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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 


"We доп 1 always wear plaid, 

but when we do, it is usually a 
good time." 

-Moods of Norway 


Го 


moods of norway 


Ajo) Ag авивоц Jepun pesn рио ‘оц фочоцошедщ sesudieju3 АодАо4 jo зфошерол eio ибвед poer IIqqoy eui рио AogApjg оц |риоцошәш sesudiajuz AOGADIg ог O 


Clothing for the шап... 


impeccably disguised 


as a sensible adult 


*Descendant of Thieves 


Google it 


Brandon Thibodeaux 


“| was taken aback by Harvey's impact 
but was left encouraged by the strength 
of my friends, family and neighbors,” 
says the southeast Texas native and 
photographer of Texas After the Storm. 
He adds, “What good is the world be- 
yond your gate if you can’t see the one 
in your own backyard?” Thibodeaux's 
new book is In That Land of Perfect Day. 


Anna del Gaizo 


Born and raised in New York City, 
del Gaizo landed on the West Coast 
as PLAYBOY’s senior associate editor 
just in time for the magazine’s return 
to nudity in the Naked Is Normal issue 
(March/April 2017). Our resident 
Playmate profiler has penned every 
pictorial since, including this issue’s 
Playmate Review. 


PLAYBILL 


Brian J. Karem 


Karem's insistence on open discourse 
has led the CNN analyst everywhere 
from America's Most Wanted to the 
White House, where he regularly goes 
head-to-head with Sarah Huckabee 
Sanders. In Senator Flake vs. the New 
Normal, he reports on the days before 
and after the Republican announced 
that he would not seek reelection. 


Anya Alvarez 


The former pro golfer looks at the 
changing world of women and sports 
in Leveling the Playing Field. “Female 
athletes are activists by default sim- 
ply because they're carving a space for 
themselves in a world that hasn't always 
been welcoming,” Alvarez says. Her 
new website, MajorLeagueGirls.com, 
launched in December. 


Felisha Tolentino 


Photographer Tolentino got her start 
assisting Mark “Cobrasnake” Hunter and 
shooting celebrity portraits for Nylon. 
Featuring everyone from SZA to Miguel, 
her portfolio reads like a cool-kid who's 
who. For Let's Play, she captured Tove 
Lo's crazy, sexy vibe to a playlist “that 
had the whole crew dancing,” she says. 
“It felt like shooting a friend.” 


Jonas Bergstrand 


The Swedish illustrator-designer's 
work is a delightful cacophony of 
typography, conceptual color palettes 
and collage-like cutouts that read as 
Mad Men-era advertisements yet 
somehow feel fresh. For this issue, 
Bergstrand lends his retro stylings to 
Leveling the Playing Field, the sports 
story by Anya Alvarez. 


Jonathan Tasini 


In Coming to (Mid)Terms, Tasini, who 
sat down with Bernie Sanders for the 
November 2013 Playboy Interview, 
explains what will be at stake in the 
2018 midterm elections, when vot- 
ers determine America's legislative 
and judicial DNA for the following 
four years. His new book, Resist and 
Rebel, is out in February. 


Ariel Dorfman 


Dorfman's background is as fasci- 
nating as his fiction. The Argentine 
Chilean American playwright, activ- 
ist and author of the celebrated play 
Death and the Maiden first contrib- 
uted to PLAYBOY in 2010. In his power- 
fulshortstory What She Saw, Dorfman 
explores love, secrets and what it's like 
to be held prisoner by your past. 


CREDITS: Cover and pp. 118-132: model Megan Samperi at No Ties Management, photography by Christopher von Steinbach, styling by Kelley Ash, hair and makeup by Bree Collins. Photography by: p. 6 courtesy Anya Alvarez, courtesy Jonas Bergstrand, cour- 
tesy Anna del Gaizo, courtesy Brian Karem, courtesy Jonathan Tasini, courtesy Brandon Thibodeaux, courtesy Felisha Tolentino, Sergio Parra; р. 18 Jesus Dominguez, Jeff Robins, Evan Woods, Phil Yoon ; p. 19 Chapman Baehler, Amanda Brian, Scott Hathaway; 
p. 20 courtesy Playboy Archives, Holly Parker, Evan Woods; p. 27 courtesy Apple, courtesy Ava, courtesy IKEA, courtesy Tesla; p. 28 Miller Mobley/courtesy Paramount Network and Weinstein Television; p. 29 Jeff Neumann/Hulu; p. 40 Dean Rutz/The Seattle 
Times via Associated Press; p. 42 Sara Naomi Lewkowicz; p. 43 George Gojkovich/Getty Images; Robert Laberge/Getty Images; p. 64 Heji Shin/courtesy Eckhaus Latta; p. 65 courtesy Megumi Igarashi, courtesy Rose McGowan, courtesy Alyssa Milano, cour- 
tesy Natalie White, Aubrey Gemignani (2), Alexander Koerner/Getty Images, Shannon Stapleton/Reuters; p. 66 courtesy Biem, courtesy KSR, courtesy Liberos LLC, courtesy Netflix, courtesy Realbotix, Stephane Cardinale/Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images; p. 
67 courtesy Beyoncé, Annie Leibovitz/courtesy Vanity Fair, David Bellemere, Derek Kettela; p. 68 Heji Shin/courtesy Eckhaus Latta, Graham Dunn, Marcelo Soubhia/MCV Photo for The Washington Post via Getty Images, Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for Marc 
Jacobs; p. 69 courtesy CamSoda, courtesy Fun Factory, courtesy LELO, courtesy Vivid Entertainment, Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images; pp. 92-93, 95 Paul Wetherell/Trunk Archive; p. 98 courtesy Random House, Win McNamee/Getty Images; p. 99 Sara D. 
Davis/Getty Images; pp. 134 Ali Mitton; p. 135 Gavin Bond, Christopher von Steinbach, Stephan Würth; p. 136 Graham Dunn; p. 137 Aaron Feaver, Jonathan Leder, Stephan Würth; p. 138 Derek Kettela (2), Jason Lee Parry; p. 139 Kyle Deleu; p. 159 courtesy Playboy 
Archives; p. 160 courtesy Playboy Archives, Suzanne Seed; p. 161 courtesy Playboy Archives; p. 162 courtesy Playboy Archives, Suzanne Seed (3); pp. 163-172, 174, 176 courtesy Playboy Archives. P. 8 model Milan Dixon at Photogenics Media LA, styling by Kel- 
ley Ash, hair and makeup by Adrienne Herbert for Art Department; p. 23 styling by Annie & Hannah, hair by Tiffany Nales, makeup by Miguel Andrisani; pp. 45-52 hair and makeup by Karen Lynn Accattato; pp. 54-63 model Abby Brothers at Vision Los Angeles, 
styling by Kelley Ash, hair by Marley Gonzales for the Rex Agency, makeup by Debbie Gallagher for Opus Beauty; pp. 76-89 model Kayla Garvin at Factor Chosen LA, styling by Kelly Brown, hair by David Keough for Art Department, makeup by Michal Cohen, 
produced by Nick Larsen; pp. 100-110 model Anthea Page, styling by Bec Nolan, hair and makeup by Ashlea Penfold; pp. 150-157 model Lorena Medina at No Ties Management, crew members Monica Dahl, Brian Gentry, Shawna Gentry, Ty Nitti, Itay Ohayon. 


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VOTE! 
Review 2017's 
magnificent 
Playmates 

on page 134. 


CONTENTS 
Departments 


LET’S PLAY Swedish pop star Tove Lo tells us all about her “Disco Tits” 23 
TECH From delivery bots to app-assisted birth control, we take a look at tech to expect in 2018 26 
ТУ New miniseries Waco and returning Hulu standout The Path challenge the way we think about cults in America 28 
ART Meet five members of Creatives for Climate: cutting-edge artists reinventing the Rabbit for a good cause ЗО 
POLITICS Republicans control the political landscape; will Trump torpedo their shot at hanging on to power? 36 
SPORTS women in athletics are coming together to drop-kick inequality into oblivion 40 


ALSO: Digestifs to steam up your winter nights; our Advisor on love and football; asexy valentine from Drawn Data; and more 


Features 


INTERVIEW Christie Hefner opens up about her years at the helm of Playboy and her relationship with Hef 45 
YEAR IN SEX Pull on your pussyhat and get ready to review 2017's biggest sex stories 64 
FICTION secrets, silence and survival in What She Saw by Ariel Dorfman 7O 
20Q Cillian Murphy reflects on Peaky Blinders and the perils of being pigeonholed 92 
PROFILE Following Senator Jeff Flake in the days before and after his shattering announcement 96 
TEXAS AFTER THE STORM on the American front line of the war between industry and the environment 112 
FICTION Darrel's got demons and a dead friend in What Are You Thinking About Right Now by Baird Harper 140 
IS THIS GUY FOR REAL? Box Brown gives the comics treatment to Andy Kaufman’s Playmate wrestling match 146 


HERITAGE рглувоу’5 founding art director made its pages a bastion of brilliance. Plus: Liv Lindeland, Kim Farber and more 159 


Pictorials 
KINDRED SPIRITS Abby Brothers and a mountain lion—two breathtaking forces of nature 54 
ON THE WING Enjoy alazy, lacy morning with January Playmate Kayla Garvin 76 
THE GIRL FROM OZ Anthea Page is an astonishing Aussie 100 
SCORE! rebruary Playmate Megan Samperi is the tough-as-nails tomboy of your dreams 118 
PLAYMATE REVIEW Hailing from Moscow, Paris, Chicago and more, the world’s loveliest women want your PMOY vote 134 


BACK AT THE RANCH Off Route 66 you'll find no better roadside attraction than Lorena Medina 150 


ON THE COVER Megan Samperi, photographed by Christopher von Steinbach. Opposite: Milan Dixon, photographed by Aaron Feaver. 


VOL. 65, NO. 1-JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 


hd 


PLAYBOY 


HUGH M. HEFNER 


EDITOR-IN-CHIEF 
1953-2017 


COOPER HEFNER GHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER 
CHRIS DEACON GREATIVE DIRECTOR 
JAMES RICKMAN EXECUTIVE EDITOR 

CATAUER DEPUTY EDITOR 


GILMACIAS MANAGING EDITOR 


EDITORIAL 
ELIZABETH SUMAN SENIOR EDITOR; ANNADELGAIZO SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR 
WINIFRED ORMOND COPY CHIEF; SAMANTHASAIYAVONGSA RESEARCH EDITOR 
AMANDAWARREN EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT 


SHANE MICHAEL SINGH EXECUTIVE EDITOR, DIGITAL 


ART 


CHRISTOPHER SALTZMAN ART DIRECTOR; AARON LUCAS ART MANAGER 


PHOTOGRAPHY 
ANNAWILSON PHOTO EDITOR; EVANSMITH ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITOR 
SANDRAEVANS PHOTO ASSISTANT 
CHRISTIE HARTMANN SENIOR MANAGER, PLAYBOY ARCHIVES 
JOEY COOMBE GOORDINATOR, PLAYBOY ARCHIVES 


AMY KASTNER-DROWN SENIOR DIGITAL MEDIA SPECIALIST, PLAYBOY ARCHIVES 


PRODUCTION 


LESLEY К. RIPPON PRODUCTION DIRECTOR; HELEN YEOMAN-SHAW PRODUCTION SERVICES MANAGER 


PUBLIC RELATIONS 


TERITHOMERSON SENIOR DIRECTOR, PUBLIC RELATIONS; TAMARAPRAHAMIAN SENIOR DIRECTOR, PUBLICITY 


PLAYBOY ENTERPRISES INTERNATIONAL, INC. 
BEN KOHN CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER 
JARED DOUGHERTY GHIEF REVENUE OFFICER 


JOHN VLAUTIN CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS 


ADVERTISING AND MARKETING 
MARIEFIRNENO VIGE PRESIDENT, ADVERTISING DIRECTOR 
LOS ANGELES: KARIJASPERSOHN DIRECTOR, MARKETING AND ACTIVATION 


BRYAN PRADO SENIOR CAMPAIGN MANAGER 


Playboy (ISSN 0032-1478), January/February 2018, volume 65, number 1. Published bi-monthly by Playboy in national and regional editions, Playboy, 9346 Civic Center Drive, Beverly Hills, California 90210. Periodicals postage 
paid at Beverly Hills, California and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post Canadian Publications Mail Sales Product Agreement No. 40035534. Subscriptions: in the U.S., $38.97 for a year. Postmaster: Send all UAA to CFS 
(see DMM 707.4.12.5); nonpostal and military facilities, send address changes to Playboy, Р.О. Box 62260, Tampa, FL 33662-2260. For subscription-related questions, e-mail playboy@customersvc.com. To comment on content, 
e-mail letters@playboy.com. « We occasionally make portions of our customer list available to carefully screened companies that offer products or services we believe you may enjoy. If you do not want to receive these offers or 
information, please let us know by writing to us at Playboy Enterprises International, Inc. c/o TCS, P.O. Box 62260, Tampa, FL 33662-2260, or e-mail playboy@customersve.com. It generally requires eight to 10 weeks for your 
request to become effective. • Playboy assumes no responsibility to return unsolicited editorial or graphic or other material. All rights in letters and unsolicited editorial and graphic material will be treated as unconditionally 
assigned for publication and copyright purposes, and material will be subject to Playboy’s unrestricted right to edit and comment editorially. Contents copyright © 2017 by Playboy. All rights reserved. Playboy, Playmate and 
Rabbit Head symbol are marks of Playboy, registered U.S. Trademark Office. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any electronic, mechanical, photocopying or 
recording means or otherwise without prior written permission of the publisher. Any similarity between the people and places in the fiction and semi-fiction in this magazine and any real people and places is purely coincidental. 
For credits see page 6. Five Bradford Exchange onserts in domestic subscription polywrapped copies. Certificado de licitud de titulo No. 7570 de fecha 29 de Julio de 1993, y certificado de licitud de contenido No. 5108 de 
fecha 29 de Julio de 1993 expedidos por la comision Calificadora de publicaciones y revistas ilustradas dependiente de la secretaría de gobernación, Mexico. Reserva de derechos 04-2000-071710332800-102. Printed in USA. 


12 


Jewelry now available at 


Y PLAYBOY SHOP com 


EYEWITNESS 
I couldn't wait to see the November/December 
issue. I thought for sure the cover would be Ines 
Rau (Enchanté, Mademoiselle Rau), but I was 
heartened to see Hugh Hefner instead. I got 
teary-eyed reading the tribute to him. He was a 
trailblazer, and to break barriers with the first 
transgender Playmate in the same issue says 
even more. The Rabbit in his eye on the cover 
is how he would have seen it. 
Joey Munguia 
Laredo, Texas 


Thank you for the great tribute to Hugh Hefner 
in the November/December issue. I was very 
pleased to find the Rabbit as a sparkle in Hef’s 
eye. It was the perfect touch. 

Gordon D. King 

Laconia, New Hampshire 


I must tell you that the hidden Rabbit on the 
November/December cover is the best ever. 
How appropriate that the windows of Hef’s soul 
reveal his legacy. This image is right up there 
with the Rabbit Head hidden in a freckle, the 
impression on a pillow and the curl in a coif. 
Ron Stokes 
Lutz, Florida 


FACT-CHECK, PLEASE 
I saw some press about the first transgen- 
der Playmate appearing in your November/ 
December issue. Is this claim accurate? I 
believe your first transgender Playmate was 
Tula, in 1991; she was also a Bond girl. 
Lance K. Evans 
Keller, Texas 
Bond girl Caroline “Tula” Cossey was the first 
transgender woman to bare it all for a pictorial 
in our pages, but she was not a Playmate. 


MOTHER NATURE NEEDS US 

I was thrilled to see the latest installment of 
The Playboy Philosophy (November/Decem- 
ber) take a stand on conservation and envi- 
ronmentalism. Climate change and other 
environmental problems pose genuine threats 
to all of us and to our planet, and they de- 
serve our serious attention. We need to break 
through people’s complacency and resist the 
forces of denial and misinformation. Please 
make sure to carefully fact-check future 
articles on these issues. Climate deniers and 
other naysayers are only too eager to pounce 
on the smallest mistake or misstatement to 
try to discredit any writing they disagree with. 


DEAR PLAYBOY 


COLLECTOR'S EDITION 


1926-2017 


NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2017 


Our 2017 year-end issue—a profoundly bittersweet moment in Playboy history. 


They'll probably do it regardless, but please 
don’t give them a legitimate hook—let them 
be solidly in the wrong. I’m sure plenty of my 
fellow scientists would be happy to help. 

Tim Benner 

Silver Spring, Maryland 


SAY IT AGAIN 
That’s right—feminism is about social, eco- 
nomic and political equality (The Playboy Phi- 
losophy, July/August). 
Patrick Maniscalco 
Albuquerque, New Mexico 


HITTING THE HIGH NOTES 

I applaud your efforts in creating a music- 
themed issue (September/October), but I 
think it should have featured more well- 
known artists. I don’t expect Taylor Swift to 
pose nude—Halsey’s photo shoot and inter- 
view were cool—but the lack of star power left 
me wanting to shuffle-play through the pages. 


If it is indeed a music issue, shouldn’t the fea- 
tured content (such as Playboy Interview) re- 
late to music? At least the Heritage section 
nailed the theme with its fascinating read on 
Playboy Records (Going Vinyl). If this issue 
becomes an annual event, I hope the next one 
is double platinum. 

EdK. 

Los Angeles, California 


THANK YOU, JESUS 

Alexander Chee's remembrance of Denis 
Johnson and his masterwork, Jesus” Son 
(Writing for Survival, November/December), 
is a revealing tribute to a great American 
writer. My introduction to Johnson was 
through PLAYBOY's four-part serial Nobody 
Move (July, August, September, October 
2008). I loved the crime noir atmosphere of 
that work and so was inspired to investigate 
his other writing, including Angels, Fiska- 
doro, Tree of Smoke and, yes, Jesus’ Son—all 


14 


LARRY GORDON 


SHOEPASSION 


м— 


THE BERLIN SHOE BRAND 


Discover our collection online at www.shoepassion.com 
Or experience it in person at selected retailers 


very different but equally sad, moving and 
beautiful. Thank you, PLAYBOY, for opening 
that world for me. 
J.R. Pierce 
Brooklyn, New York 


O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN! 

The pipe and captain’s hat in Johanne Landbo’s 
seaworthy pictorial (Anchors Aweigh, Novem- 
ber/December) serve as a moving and fitting 
(if presumably coincidental) tribute to Hugh 
Hefner. May his legacy be carried on in your 
pages for decades to come. 

Jeff Ohm 


Berlin, Germany 


SEEKING ADVICE 
The best thing to happen to the magazine, 
besides the return of nudity, has been the deci- 
sion to once again include multiple questions in 
Playboy Advisor. However, though I enjoy the 
advice, I think it’s time to go back to real and 
fun questions that require more than a sim- 
ple Google search to answer. That’s why people 
like me have enjoyed reading the Advisor over 
the years—it answers everything you'd want to 
know, from sex and dating to fashion tips and 
fantasy football. Now the Advisor seems more 
like a tough-love doctor. 
Т.Е. 
Richmond, Kentucky 
We can’t say we've ever been the best source 
for advice on fantasy football—we're in the 
business of a different kind of fantasy. We will 
pass your note on to our Advisor, though we 
think this issue’s advice on how a couple can 
watch porn together is as fun and real as it gets. 


GIFTS THAT KEEP ON GIVING 
As acat and dog (not to mention Bunny) lover, 
I want to thank you for advising readers to 
donate to the Animal Rescue Corps this holi- 
day season (Playboy's American-Made Gift 
Guide, November/December). It was a wel- 
come surprise to see a gift guide that promotes 
American-made goods and isn't completely 
focused on consumerism. 
May Jefferson 
Madison, Wisconsin 


KNOCK, KNOCK 

I’mcurious as to why you seem to have replaced 

your old joke writers. Recent selections for 

Party Jokes have been so lame that if you told 

them at a party you would be asked to leave. 
Paul Hosmer 
Dillwyn, Virginia 


hd 


DEAR PLAYBOY 


™ 


Ahoy, beauty! A tip of the hat to Johanne Landbo. 


Over the years I’ve had the distinct feeling that 
I was trading jokes with Hugh Hefner him- 
self. Unfortunately, that ended after the Party 
Jokes page was dropped and then reinstated a 
year later with a noticeably different tone. I’ve 
read only one joke since then that sounded like 
Hef’s signature sense of humor, and it defi- 
nitely made me laugh. 

Steven Rovnyak 

Indianapolis, Indiana 

Alas, it’s hard to tickle everyone's funny bone. 

We're constantly evolving here, and that in- 
cludesmaking sure our humor reflects the times. 
See if this issue's jokes page does it for you. 


WRITTENININK 
What does the tattoo on Playmate Allie 
Leggett's left hip read (Fire and Iceland, 
November/December)? Despite giving it a lot 
of long looks, I can’t figure it out. 
Dave Burton 
Dallas, Texas 
Allie responds: “The one on my side says NO 
FEAR and the one on the back of my neck is the 
coordinates to my home in Kentucky.” 


PICTURE-PERFECT PUTIN 

I enjoyed Steve Friess's article about Russia- 
adjacent Estonia's uncomfortable position— 
both geographically and technologically 


(Danger in Tomorrowland, November/De- 
cember). I especially loved the full-page 
art that ran with the story. Putin as a red- 
skinned, green-eyed devil looming over the 
country is perfect. 

Frank Fuller 

Los Angeles, California 


AMAN OF HIS TIME... 
Many people don’t know that Hugh Hefner 
was a social activist who hired stage per- 
formers such as the wonderfully multi- 
dimensional man of character Dick Gregory. 
Sadly, Hef and Gregory’s friendship ended 
last year with both their passings. To whom 
can our nation now turn its eyes for lessons 
on unconditional love? 
Anthony Parisi Sanchez 
Vineland, New Jersey 


- А MAN FOR ALL TIME 

Playboy and I have been intertwined for de- 
cades. My father had an office on East Ohio 
Street in downtown Chicago that happened to 
be right across from Playboy’s headquarters. 
He said that he could see beautiful women 
coming and going all the time. 

When Playboy outgrew the Ohio Street of- 
fices, Hugh Hefner bought the Palmolive 
Building and moved his company there. When 
I was a little kid I lived in a third-floor apart- 
ment on Chicago's northeast side. It had asun- 
room with a view to the south, and I liked to 
watch the aircraft beacon on the top of the 
Playboy building—named the Lindbergh bea- 
con after Charles Lindbergh—flashing every 
10 seconds. 

Now, more than 50 years later, I live in a 
house designed by Bart Prince, the same ar- 
chitect who did Barbi Benton’s house in Aspen, 
Colorado. Hef cast a long shadow on popu- 
lar culture. To do what he did—in 1953—took 
amazing guts. I have no doubt my life would 
have been greatly impoverished without him. 

Robert Borden 
Jemez Springs, New Mexico 


COVER STORY , 
What could be sweeter than | 
sharing a sundae with Febru- $ A 


ary Playmate Megan Samperi? M Ny y < 
Our Rabbit seems to know the № AL t 


right answer. 


E-mail letters@playboy.com, or write 


9346 Civic Center Drive, Beverly Hills, California 90210. 


16 


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Last fall, Burton Morris became the latest 
in a long line of pop artists—including Andy 
Warhol and Keith Haring—to put his own 
spin on our Rabbit Head. The resulting ex- 
hibit, titled Painting Playboy: Burton Morris 
and held at Taglialatella Galleries in Manhat- 
tan’s Chelsea neighborhood, featured no fewer 
than 64 unique versions of our ubiquitous 


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BURTON MORRIS RETHINKS THE RABBIT 


logo. Burton, who has taken on such globe- 
spanning brands as Coca-Cola, Chanel and 
Ford, created his Rabbit pieces using every- 
thing from spray paint to diamond dust. On 
November 9 the gallery hosted a packed open- 
ing reception with a guest list that included 
Playboy Chief Creative Officer Cooper Hefner, 
CEO Ben Kohn anda pair of Playmates. 


Halloween in Vegas 
and a Fashion Show 
at Playboy HQ 


Our 2017 Halloween party—TAO Las Vegas 
Presents Playboy’s Haunted Fantasy—was def- 
initely one for the ages. A bevy of costumed 
Playmates, a searing set by homegrown DJ 
Wellman anda frighteningly sexy costume con- 
test were among the highlights at the Venetian 
that night. Some of the more eye-catching cos- 
tumes hada sneaky Playboy signature: Last fall 
we teamed up with apparel brand Yandy for a 
series of fun and unapologetically hot Hallow- 
een ensembles, including Go-Go Bunny, Disco 
Bunny and the totally tubular 1980s Workout 
Bunny. (Believe it or not, this was also the first 
time Playboy had ever participated in an offi- 
cial costume based on the Bunny outfit.) The 
collection launched just before Halloween with 
a steamy invite-only fashion show at Playboy 
central in Beverly Hills. 


Good Worth Cooks Up 
More Playboy Swag 


Playboy partnered with cheeky clothing and ac- 
cessories brand Good Worth & Co. for a holiday 
collection that includes screen-printed Rabbit 
Head shirts (pictured above on Riley Hawk). 


18 


PLAYMATES 
SALUTE OUR 
ARMED SERVICES 


This past Veterans Day we thought 
we'd give our readers—and our 
fighting men and women—a little 
something extra. With the help of 
nine Playmates, we put together a 
pinup-style shoot that pays tribute 
to four branches of the U.S. armed 
forces. Here, Kristy Garett (Febru- 
ary 2016), Summer Altice (August 
2000) and Michelle McLaughlin 
(February 2008) salute the Air 
Force and the Navy. 


Cooper Hefner 
Named to 
Forbes List 


Congratulations are in order for 
Playboy Chief Creative Officer 
Cooper Hefner, who was chosen 
for the exclusive Forbes 30 Under 
30 list for 2018. The 26-year-old, 
who rejoined the company in 2016, 
is no stranger to accolades for his 
efforts to return nudity to the mag- 
azine and to revitalize the Playboy 
brand: In September 2017, Hefner 
was also named to Folio’s Change- 
makers list. 


West L.A. Vets 
Get Some Very 
Special Visitors 


As we do every Veterans Day, Playboy 
sent a delegation of Playmates—Irina 
Voronina (January 2001), Carly Lau- 
ren (October 2013), Raquel Pomplun 
(PMOY 2013) and Alison Waite (May 
2006)—to the West Los Angeles VA 
Medical Center, where they met with 
roughly 250 veterans. Selfies were 
snapped, head shots were signed 
and plenty of goodwill was shared 
between our Playmates and the hos- 
pital’s resident heroes—whom we 
commend now and year-round. 


19 


PLAYBOY.COM 


READ. WATGH. EXPERIENCE 


BONUS MAGAZINE 
CONTENT 

e Startoff 2018 right 

with an extended gallery 
of January Playmate 
Kayla Garvin. 

e Synth-pop star Tove 
Lotook a break from her 
PLAYBOY shoot for a charac- 
teristically wild video Q&A. 
e Unlike the midterms, 
voting for Playmate of the 
Year won't leave you with a 
headache. We have all the 
information you need on 
the 12 candidates. 


THE BEST OF OUR 
ARCHIVES 

e Denzel Washington is 
sparking awards-season 
chatter for his role in 
Roman J. Israel, Esq. His 
2002 Playboy Interview 
explores what it means 
tobeablack actor in 
Hollywood and remains 
relevant 16 years later. 


CULTURE, 
POLITICS & MORE 
eOur diary from the 
underbelly of the 


ONLINE- 
EXCLUSIVE 
GALLERIES 
e Insta-queen 
Cherie Noel, 
photographed 
by Evan Woods. 


Caribbean’s secret sex- 
tourism scene may have 
you pricing flights. 

ө 15 fragile masculinity 
fake news? We enlisted 
asex columnist to reject 
every man who messaged 
her on OkCupid for a 
month to find out. 

е What’s going on at Camp 
David now that the presi- 
dent prefers Mar-a-Lago? 
We visit the hometown of 
America’s most beloved 
(but now ignored) presi- 
dential retreat. 


9 
= 


20 


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—comments on Birth Control Is Health Care, and 
Health Care Is a Human Right by Caroline Orr 


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LET'S PLAY 


TOVE LO 


Swedish pop singer-songwriter 
Tove Lo is incapable of self- 
censorship; we've seen this since 
she first emerged, in 2013, with 
the addictive single “Habits 
(Stay High).” She has spent the 
past four years conquering ever- 
larger stages, often with only 
glitter covering her nipples, kit- 
ting out her house-infused synth 
pop with unfiltered lyrics about 
sex, drugs and hard-won self- 
discovery. The result: a bracing 
new paradigm of how women in 
pop can present themselves. In 
addition to co-writing for artists 
including Lorde, Nick Jonas and 
Ellie Goulding, Lo takes charge 
behind the scenes, funding her 
own films to accompany 2016’s 
Lady Wood album. That title, by 
the way, is a female twist on the 
male anatomy; her new album, 
Blue Lips, is another cheeky 
reversal. Both suggest insatia- 
ble appetites—a theme borne out 
by the new album’s lead single, 
“Disco Tits,” whose video depicts 
Loin flagrante with a yellow bug- 
eyed puppet. Therein lies a key 
weapon in her arsenal: “It’s rare 
to make fun of female sexuality,” 
she says. “Naked dudes in mov- 
ies can be sexy or funny, but not 
women. I like to play with that.” 
Having recently turned 30, with 
new music and a new love in the 
mix, Lo feels reborn. “I made it 
to this!” she says with a laugh. 
"I'm whole."—Eve Barlow 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY 
FELISHA TOLENTINO 


‘td 
| 


| | ТІГІН ІЗ 
ШШШ THE NIGHTCAP j 


4 From coast to coast, the after-dinner cocktail 

per | IS enjoying а renaissance. Here, we spotlight a 
i dozen ace bottle jockeys who are rethinking 
four pillars of postprandial pleasure 


BY ALIA AKKAM PHOTOGRAPHY BY MAURIZIO DI IORIO 


ШШЩ 


„ № 


ІШІ 


fu. ” 
ти! ١ 


| 


| 
е 
| 


AMARO 


If Campari is the ideal Italian overture to 
dinner, then amaro is the finale; the bitter- 
sweet liqueur is a stomach settler that shines 
beautifully in cocktails 


@ Fernet-Branca is one of the most revered 
names in the category, and a float of it crowns 
the Howling Owl at the Pass & Provisions 

in Houston. Bartender Patrick Dougherty’s 
wintry revamp of the piña colada includes 


DESSERT 


Sometimes the purpose of 
the after-dinner cocktail is to 
stand in for, say, a stupefying 
slab of fudgy cake 


@ Kate Gerwin, who runs 
the bar at Front & Cooper 
at Abbott Square Market 

in Santa Cruz, California, makes her Evergreenies 
drink with local Mutari chocolate, chicory, Dolin 
Génépy and Fernet-Branca, capped with raspberry 
preserves and truffle cream. 


O At the Korean restaurant Oiji in New York, head 
bartender Ryan Te prepares the honey buttered rum, 
an upgrade of the holiday favorite, with a slew of rums, 
Cynar, lemon juice, Dolin Blanc vermouth, cayenne- 
cinnamon powder and an apple sabayon float. 


@ The Share the Pear at Péché in Austin is a low- 
proof adult milkshake that bar manager Shaun 
Meglen blends from Osborne fino sherry, St. George 
spiced pear liqueur and house-made vanilla ice cream. 


DRINKS 


absinthe, Coco López cream of coconut, 
pineapple and lime juices, and turbinado sugar. 


@ At the Washington, D.C. ramen joint Toki 
Underground, the best way to come down 
from your noodle high is with the Aviato from 
Chris Chapman-Shakra, who oversees the 
bar program. In this agave-centric ode to the 
boulevardier cocktail, Fidencio mezcal, Bitter 
Truth Golden Falernum liqueur and habañero 
shrub mingle with Chapman-Shakra’s amaro 
of choice: Cappelletti’s smoky Sfumato 
Rabarbaro, made with Chinese rhubarb. 


€ To lend dark, chocolaty undertones to 

the drink known as the Pavement Artist, 
Patrick Halloran, bar manager of Henrietta 
Red in Nashville, reaches for Amaro Nardini. 
Plantation Grande Réserve Barbados five- 
year-old rum is washed with brown butter 
filched from the restaurant’s pastry station 
and blended with Punt e Mes, orange and 
chocolate bitters, and a pinch of salt. Pro tip: 
Let it sit for a minute or two so that its slightly 
warm state elicits what Halloran calls “a crazy 
chocolate chip cookie dough nose.” 


TEA 


An all-natural relaxant, 
tea makes a lovely 
addition to calming 
after-dinner cocktails 


@ The base of 
proprietor Kenta 
Goto’s malty Hojicha 
Milk Punch at Bar 
Goto in New York is 
Japanese rice vodka 
invigorated by a jolt 


and then, for a modern 
spin on the old pal 
cocktail, pairs it with 
Campari and swaps 
out the vermouth for 
St-Germain. “Honestly, 
rye and chamomile 

is an unlikely flavor 
combination, but it 
works,” Waugh says. 
“Rye doesn’t have alot 
of pretty notes, so it 
benefits from the light, 
floral, soft flavor.” 


of earthiness from 
hojicha (roasted green 
tea), mixed with cream 
and shaken with ice. 


@ Chamomile, in mixed 
and misted form, is 

the star of Thomas 
Waugh's tea-inspired 
drink of the same name 


а the Pool Lounge in 
midtown Manhattan. «e 
He infuses Wild Turkey 

101 rye with the mild tea 


НОТ TODDY 


With its predictable mélange of booze, water 
and honey, this seasonal stalwart has tended 


to bore—until now 


@ Bar manager Colin Carroll of Trifecta Tavern 
in Portland, Oregon offers a dazzling outlier 


with a drink called No Fixed Destination. 
Served in an Irish-coffee mug 
and topped with apple cider, 

it rests on a foundation of 
Laird's applejack, Portland's 
own scorpion-chile-spiked 
Bee Local Hot Honey and 
Krogstad aquavit for a spark of 
brightness. 


@ Subtle fiery appeal awaits 
at the Walker Inn in Los 
Angeles, home of the Heat 
Miser. Co-owner Devon Tarby 
infuses Elijah Craig 12-year- 


old bourbon with Thai chile and then melds it 
with Luxardo Amaro Abano, Alexander Jules 
amontillado, Fuji apple juice, Grade B maple 
syrup, verjuice and salt. For a shockingly chilly 
contrast, she accompanies it with apple ice 
wine ice cream. (That's not atypo; we're talking 
about ice cream made from apple ice wine.) 


@ Estelle Bossy, head bartender of Del Posto in 
New York, had Victorian Christmas 
puddings and pomanders on her 
mind when she dreamed up the 
Blessed Thistle. Italian liqueur 
Cynar is heightened by the 
addition of Laird's apple brandy, 
Drambuie, lime and salt. Building 
on the artichoke in the Cynar, 
Bossy decided to "double down 

on the floral theme" with a spiced 
hibiscus tea. That last ingredient 
is both tart and high in vitamin 

C, making it, in Bossy's words, 
"perfect for a cold-weather dram." 


OPPOSITE PAGE: The January Crusta, Chicago bartender Julia Momose's wintry twist on the classic brandy crusta, is the color of garnets—the gemstone of its namesake month. 
Copper & Kings brandy and J. Rieger & Co. Caffé amaro are the main ingredients, and it's capped off with a rim of cinnamon, sugar and truffle salt and a lemon-peel garnish. 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY ADAM NICKEL 


Trying to predict the tech world’s reli- 
ably chaotic trajectory often seems a futile 
endeavor. Sleeper-hit products materialize to 
solve problems we didn’t know we had, while 
multimillion-dollar fads flame out in the 
time it takes to cold-press some kale in a 
black-market Juicero. But every once in a 
while an identifiable trend manifests, offer- 
ing a glimpse of our ever more con- 
nected future. In 2018 we’re bound 
to see more overlap between the dig- 
ital and physical worlds, a swelling 
chorus of soothing voice assistants and the 
further outsourcing of human grunt work to 
artificial intelligence. It could be the tipping 
point in a robot uprising—or just another year 
full of cool stuff that makes our lives drasti- 
cally more efficient, fun and even sexy. Here 
then are five innovations that will shape the 
next 12 months and beyond. 


ev JIMI 
FAMUREWA 


TECH 


RT IMITATES LIFE 


From batteries to birth control, five dizzying innovations that could transform our lives this year 


AR Will Colonize Your Phone 


While continuing to insist to a shrugging 
public that VR is more than an expensive, 
apartment-clogging disappointment, Big 
Tech's major players are investing heavily in 
augmented reality: smartphone-enabled digi- 
tal graphics that seamlessly interact with the 
physical world. Pokémon Go, the focus of a 
short-lived global mania in 2016, 
is still the most famous example 
of mainstream AR, but 2018 will 
see multiple attempts to prove 
there's more to it than catching Charizards. 
Google, unbowed by the hubristic disaster of 
Google Glass, is making waves with ARCore, 
a new platform that lets you plant moving 
augmented-reality stickers (a sleepy coffee cup, 
the Demogorgon from Stranger Things) nextto 
your friends. So far, so “Snapchat dancing hot- 
dog." But Apple's developer-ready suite ARKit 


may offer smart real-world solutions: IKEA 
Place lets you see how that end table will lookin 
aroom before you buy it, MeasureKit uses your 
phone’s camera to consign the tape measure to 
the Dumpster of history, and social start-up 
Neon allows you to find friends at festivals by 
overlaying crowds with floating AR signposts. 


You'll Buy a Butler 
When most of us watched Her, Spike Jonze’s 
disquieting look at a lonely man falling in love 
with Scarlett Johansson’s disembodied operat- 
ing system, we felt the chill of an uncomfortably 
proximate dystopia. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s 
power players were taking notes. From Amazon 
Echo to Google Home, voice assistants have been 
stealthily invading houses all over America; Am- 
azon alone has reportedly shipped more than 10 
million Echo-enabled speakers. In 2018, the 
virtual-butler boom will only get bigger with the 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY NISHANT CHOKSI 


26 


late-2017 launch of Apple’s Siri-powered Home- 
Pod, Google’s new Home Mini and Amazon’s 
sprawling family of new Echo products that can 
do everything from control your appliances to 
help you follow recipes. Yes, there are legitimate 
concerns about privacy, incrimination and 
corporate surveillance, but this train can’t be 
stopped. And looking even further ahead, x.ai’s 
Amy, an e-mail-based piece of artificial intelli- 
gence that can organize work meetings, shows 
that when it comes to virtual assistance, asking 
Alexa for traffic updates is only the start. 


e Wall-E Will Deliver 

Your Takeout 

The drone’s appeal may have plummeted, but 
Amazon is still pressing ahead with plans for a 
fleet of unmanned air-delivery vehicles. While 
the Seattle megacorporation’s progress has been 
stymied by U.S. airspace restrictions, a more 
earthbound solution has emerged. Founded 
by former Skype bosses in tech-savvy Estonia, 
robotics start-up Starship Technologies deploys 
driverless terrestrial droids to handle all man- 
ner of hyperlocal deliveries. When one of the 
knee-high bots rolls up to your door, you simply 
unlock it with a smartphone app, get your goods 
and send it on its merry way. It sounds like a folly 
doomed to fail as soon asa gang of local kids hurls 
one into anearby river, but Starship has factored 
in security: If someone tampers with a bot, an 
alarm sounds and cameras snap pictures. And 
having linked with Postmates to storm side- 
walks in Washington, D.C., San Fran- 
cisco and beyond, the Starship 
bot increasingly looks like the 
measured tortoise to Ama- 
zon’s haughty hare. Delivery 
people aren’t the only ones 
being supplanted by cute ma- 
chines: French start-up Stan- 

ley Robotics is rolling out an 
automated outdoor parking 
service that uses an intelligent 
towing droid and algorithmic 
precision to make the fumble for 
your valet ticket a thing of the past. 


e Your Home Will Come 

With Batteries 

From space tourism to solving L.A.’s traffic 
problem by boring giant holes in the ground, 
Elon Musk has always had an enjoyable Bond- 
villain mystique. But one of the Tesla CEO's 
most fascinating (and achievable) recent ini- 
tiatives is all about sparking a revolution with 
something seemingly simple. On first exami- 
nation, the Tesla Powerwall, a giant home bat- 
tery based on the electric-car manufacturer's 


= 


Wave of the future, dude. Clockwise from top left: the Ava bracelet and app; the Tesla 
Powerwall home battery; the IKEA Place app; the Apple HomePod. 


celebrated lithium-ion Powerpacks, 
sounds humdrum. But the Power- 
wall actually enables those with 
solar panels to save money by 
storing renewable energy dur- 
ing off-peak times, safeguard 
against outages, juice up electric 
cars and even sell power back to 
the grid. As ever, where one com- 
pany has led—the first Powerwall 
arrived in 2015, and a revamped 
$5,500 version started shipping this 
year—others follow. With big hitter LG 
(in collaboration with Californian solar ex- 
pert Sunrun) entering the race with its own 
cut-price energy-storage units, 2018 could 
well be the year this trend goes from the kind of 
thing wheatgrass-slurping Silicon Valley types 
yammer about to a game changer that brings 
green energy to the masses. 


e You Will Use Your Phone as... 
Birth Control? 

Imagine a smartphone that doubles as a con- 
traceptive. (No, we don't mean an ill-judged 


emoji that torpedoes your chances with a Tin- 
der match.) The smartwatch-style Ava, which 
tracks a woman’s cycle to identify when she’s 
most fertile, can be used to aid conception or 
thwart it. The iPhone’s Health app can also 
assist in this millennial rhythm method, but 
Natural Cycles, an app-and-thermometer set 
designed by Swedish particle physicist Elina 
Berglund, leads the way—algorithmically log- 
ging ovulation, basal body temperature and 
other datato chartawoman's chances of getting 
pregnant. With more and more people reject- 
ing the hormonal roulette of the morning-after 
pill or the ecological iffiness of latex condoms, 
Natural Cycles attracts an estimated 10,000 
new users each month. What’s more, last year 
the service became the first digital solution to 
be officially certified in the European Union as 
a form of birth control: In “perfect use” trials, 
it matches the pill’s effectiveness rate of 99 
percent. Although the service is not yet certi- 
fied in the States, the company has made over- 
tures to the FDA. Sex—not to mention the sight 
of your date innocently checking her phone— 
may never be the same. E 


27 


TV 


Among the Faithful... 


Waco aims to tell the story of a national tragedy from both sides—finally 


What really goes on inside acult? Over the past 
couple of years our collective fascination with 
that question has risen to a fever pitch. The 
literary world obsessed 
over Emma Cline’s The 
Girls and Stephanie 
Oakes’s The Sacred Lies 
of Minnow Bly, both of which reimagine col- 
lective madness as coming-of-age tales. Indie 
auteur Ti West barely bothered to alter the 
Jonestown story for his horror film The Sac- 
rament. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt turns 
a young woman’s sur- 
vival of a doomsday-sect 
kidnapping into screw- 
ball comedy, and Amer- 
ican Horror Story: Cult 
pulls everything from 
Andy Warhol’s Factory 
to Heaven’s Gate into its 
maniacal vision. 

John Erick Dowdle 
and Drew Dowdle are the 
brains behind Waco, the 
fledgling Paramount Net- 
work’s six-part miniseries 
about the deadly 1993 
standoff between federal 
agents and Branch David- 
ian cultists led by David 
Koresh at the group’s 
compound near Waco, 
Texas. The brothers were 
haunted by the feeling 
that the media had shown 
them—and us—a version 
of events that was super- 
ficial at best. 

“We were teenagers when the real Waco story 
happened, but I remember it unfolding live,” 
says Drew, who produces and co-writes most 
of the pair’s films. “It was this one-sided per- 
spective, from the outside in. To experience 
that same story we remember from the inside 
out was acompletely different thing.” 

Their journey through those walls started 
while they were researching a fictional 
script. One of the characters, they thought, 
could be a survivor of the fire that ended the 


sy STEVE 
PALOPOLI 


FBI and ATF siege of the compound—which 
killed 76 members of the group, including the 
33-year-old Koresh. 

“Then we said, ‘Hey, did anyone survive the 
fire?’ " remembers John, who directs and co- 
writes their work. That led them to David 
Thibodeau, one of nine Branch Davidians 
who made it out alive. The Dowdles won his 
trust, and he allowed them to work from his 
autobiography, A Place Called Waco: A Survi- 
vor’s Story. To get the feds’ side of the ordeal, 
they mined the memoirs of Gary Noesner, the 


Taylor Kitsch as David Koresh in the new miniseries Waco. 


FBI's lead negotiator during the standoff. 
But they didn’t stop there. They conducted 
hundreds of their own interviews, listened to 
all the audio of the negotiations and watched 
every inch of Koresh footage they could get 
their hands on. Their goal: a “no bad guys” 
examination that humanizes participants 
who'd been demonized as fascists or fanatics. 
They came to realize that Koresh, played in 
the Waco miniseries by Friday Night Lights 
star Taylor Kitsch, wasn’t the unhinged 


maniac presented by the media, and that 
Kitsch could embody the qualities that at- 
tracted many highly educated and spiritual 
people to Koresh’s ministry. 

“This was someone who was really knowl- 
edgeable about the Bible and, in their minds, 
cracked codes they’d been trying to solve 
their entire lives,” says Drew. 

In the end, Koresh was desperate and 
trapped, as so many of the Dowdles’ protag- 
onists have been. Time and again they’ve 
put their characters through claustropho- 
bic nightmares: the 
snaking corridors of 
an apartment building 
in 2008’s Quarantine; 
a broken elevator in 
2010s Devil; the cata- 
combs of Paris in 2014’s 
As Above, So Below. 

“It's always interest- 
ing to see howcharacters 
respond when they're 
backed into a corner,” 
Drew explains. 

And through Waco 
they found a surprising 
answer to that quixotic 
question: What really 
goes on inside a cult? 

“People think of every- 
one on the inside as hav- 
ing the same opinion, 
a kind of mind-meld,” 
says Drew. “Reading 
Thibodeau’s book, you 
realize how smart and 
opinionated these peo- 
ple were—they often disagreed with David 
Koresh—and, as events unfolded, how much 
debate happened inside over what they should 
do. It was very different from what you think 
of as a mind-control environment.” 

Perhaps that’s why cult stories resonate 
through these volatile times: They reflect 
a need to understand what drives people 
to seek order within fortified walls—and a 
sneaking suspicion that their needs are much 
the same as our own. L| 


hd 


In a Cult Called America 


The Path returns to offer an unsettlingly familiar portrait of extremism 


"People don't want to be in a cult; they want 

tobeina movement," says Aaron Paul, star of 

the Hulu original series The Path. Paul plays 

Eddie Lane, a charismatic 

sy SCOTT everyman who just may be 
PORCH extraordinary. 

The foundational story 
of Meyerism, the fictional faith at the cen- 
ter of the series, can sound outlandish or in- 
spiring, depending on your propensity for 
religious belief: In the 1970s, Stephen Meyer 
climbed a ladder of 
pure light—he may 
have been tripping 
on ayahuasca at the 
time—and received 
the wisdom of the 
universe. 

“What the Mey- 
erists preach,” says 
Paul, “isn’t too far 
from what a lot 
of other religions 
preach: Live a life 
with transparency, 
don’t lie, be good to 
each other, be good 
to the planet. You 
climb each rung 
and eventually get 
to this garden full 
of love that sounds 
incredible.” 

In its third sea- 
son, The Path asks 
viewers to allow 
for the possibility 
that Meyer truly 
did climb that ladder and achieve enlighten- 
ment, which he then passed on to his follow- 
ers, most of whom live in communes in San 
Diego and upstate New York. The other pos- 
sibility, still very much on the table, is that 
Meyerists are 100 percent bat-shit crazy. 

The first two seasons saw Lane veer from 
faithful Meyerist to outright denier and then 
back to believer. As season three begins, he 
has not just returned to the fold; he has grown 
from follower to leader—the psycho-spiritual 


offspring of Dr. Phil and the Dalai Lama. 

“Igrewupin avery religious household, be- 
lieving everything that was presented to me,” 
says Paul, whose father was a Baptist minis- 
ter. “Eddie wakes up one day and says, ‘I just 
don’t buy it anymore.’ But those beliefs keep 
pulling him back until he can’t ignore them. 
He eventually sees it as his true calling.” 

The Path presents just enough facts to make 
you believe—or come close to believing—that 
Lane is more than a fervid disciple and that 


Aaron Paul as Eddie Lane in the new season of The Path. 


Meyerism is about more than hallucinogenic 
hysteria. Lane claims to have been struck 
by lightning, seemingly corroborated by an 
elaborate scar on his back, and has had in- 
tuitions about things that came to pass. And 
then there was that time he appeared to heala 
baby with a potentially fatal heart defect just 
by touching him. 

Show runner and frequent series direc- 
tor Jessica Goldberg says one of the reasons 
The Path works is that Paul makes such a 


convincing case for Lane as a divine figure. 
“Aaron Paul is avery instinctual actor, and his 
character is coming from a very instinctual 
place,” she says. “He’s the leader and the most 
honest person who could be that leader. The 
question is whether he can stay that honest.” 
With parallels to multiple real-life reli- 
gions including Mormonism (a founder who 
saw visions), Scientology (electronic gizmos), 
Buddhism (spiritual enlightenment), shaman- 
ism (trippy drugs) and Catholicism (confes- 
sion), the Meyerist 
movement provides 
rich territory for a 
reflection on how 
a small sect with 
seemingly odd be- 
liefs can evolve into 
something greater. 
“The majority of 
cults don’t consider 
themselves cults,” 
Paul says. “Reli- 
gions start off as 
something—heaven 
and hell, let’s build 
an ark, let’s part 
the Red Sea—that 
sounds so out there. 
Once you stamp ‘re- 
ligion’ on it and get 
millions of follow- 
ers, you validate it.” 
Shocking mo- 
ments in early ep- 
isodes of season 
three reconfigure 
TV's weirdest love 
triangle—involving Lane; Sarah (Michelle 
Monaghan), Lane's wife and a lifelong Mey- 
erist; and Cal Roberts (Hugh Dancy), leader 
of the New York branch— but at its core the 
new season is about something far larger 
than personal relationships. It's an inquiry 
into the nature of truth and the deep, twisted 
foundations of belief. 
Given the current cultural climate, in which 
objective facts are more elusive than ever, this 
is the kind of story we need to be telling. Ш 


29 


ART 


CREATIVES 
FOR CLIMATE | 


Introducing a collective of artists 
who are wielding the Rabbit to 
take on climate change 


“Art is like an open window to new ideas,” 
says Kii Arens, whose Technicolor canvas 
Play Joy is reproduced here. “Words can get 
lost in the shuffle of everything that’s being 
broadcast and posted, but art doesn’t go 
away.” Art’s power to foster passionate dia- 
logue is what we had in mind when we con- 
ceived Creatives for Climate, a campaign 
to raise money for environmental causes by 
auctioning off original work by our favorite 
artists. Our only creative direction to them: 
Remix the Rabbit. It proved to be an inspiring 
prompt. “Despite the variety of what people 
pull while reading PLAYBOY, there is a Bunny 
for everyone,” says Nina Palomba, the artist 
behind the kinetic Bunny Love piece at right. 

Early in the new year we'll host a silent auc- 
tion in Los Angeles. Guests will have the op- 
portunity to bid on the very pieces you see 
here, as well as dozens more, while enjoy- 
ing drinks, live music and the sexy, sophis- 
ticated company you'd expect at any Playboy 
event. More important, we hope it will serve 
as a launchpad of sorts. As Arens puts it, “A 
Playboy art show on the topicis a platform for 
open discussion, which is the path to change.” 
If you’re interested in joining us, drop a line to 
creativesfor@playboy.com. 

Meanwhile, check out some of the art we’ve 
rounded up so far. Climate change is serious 
business, but judging by the pieces shown 
here, raising awareness about it can be a hell 
of a good time. 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY MOLLY CRANNA 


30 


a spray paint on wood, 
36 x 24 inches, 2017. 


JOE SUZUKI 


Happy Accident Series— 
Playboy Bunny. Resin casting 
material and enamel paint, 
various sizes, 2017. 


KII ARENS 


Play Joy. Archival f 
canvas print, 7) £ 


125 / 
4X 3feet, 2017. (DES 
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Р STEPHEN PALLADINO 


REMO Indulgence. Acrylic ink drawing on 
-А А paper, 40 х 26 inches, 2017. 


Playboy Advisor 


Columnist Bridget Phetasy counsels a sports novice who's dating a jock. 
Plus, Botox for her birthday, pitfalls of polyamory and more 


Q: I may be the only man ever to admit this to the Playboy Advisor, but Pm 
O not a football fan. The problem is Гт dating a Cheesehead. Football is 
her life, from playing in a fantasy league to Super Bowl partying. Гое attended 
games with her but still feel alienated from the culture—and from her when 
she talks to other men about football. If I exclude myself, will she hold it against 
me or, worse, leave me for a Cheesehead?—J.A., East Brunswick, New Jersey 


ILLUSTRATION BY ZOHAR LAZAR 


32 


You're not the first guy to admit he 
@ doesn’t like football, and there’s no 
shame in that preference. That said, I too am 
a die-hard football fan, and though ГП happily 
date a man who doesn’t share my passion, I 
don’t know ifI could commit to him long-term. 
Even if he roots for an opposing team, game 
watching is something I want to share with 
my partner. Romantic bonding over sports is 
common; consider how many couples meet in a 
sports bar, atatailgate party or in line for over- 
priced beer and nachos. Dating a person with 
different interests can be beneficial to both 
the relationship and your personal growth, but 
Ican't say whether you can completely exclude 
yourself from the billion-dollar Church of Foot- 
ball without her eventually holding it against 
you. So instead of asking me, ask her, “Is it a 
problem that I don't share your passion for foot- 
ball?” If the answer is yes, ask her why she loves 
the sport. Maybe she can help you discover an in- 
terest you didn’t know you had. But if you don’t 
start the conversation soon, she might leave you 
for someone in her fantasy football league—or 
worse, a Vikings fan. 


Q: My girlfriend has been hinting that 


O shewants me to buy her a Botox session 
Sor her birthday, but I don’t think she needs it. 
More important, I don't like the idea of her get- 
ting Botox. We live in Los Angeles, so it might 
be my city's obsession with looking young and 
being fake that turns me off. Should I grit my 
teeth and just buy it for her because it will make 
her happy?—M.L., Los Angeles, California 
As It’s awesome you don’t think she needs 
€ Botox, and I hope you tell her that. The 
fact that you love and accept her for exactly who 
she is is priceless. And I can appreciate why you 
don’t like the idea of Botox: It’s expensive; once 
you start, you can't stop; and it is literally a bac- 
terial toxin. It sounds almost like heroin. 

But let’s take a broader view. For one thing, 
Botox, which pulls in about $2 billion in annual 
revenue, is actually popular across the country. 
Miami, Salt Lake City and Austin rank as some 
of the biggest cities for plastic surgery and cos- 
metic procedures. Soccer moms in suburbs all 
over America are throwing Botox-and-wine 
parties. And if someone wants to do some- 
thing to make themselves feel younger or bet- 
ter, who are we to judge? If they want a breast 
augmentation, a nose job or a spray tan, that’s 
entirely their prerogative. Your lady has prob- 
ably invested in gifts she felt you didn’t neces- 
sarily need but knew you wanted. Maybe she 
got you the latest Call of Duty game—or a July 
1968 edition of PLAYBOY. Moral of the story: If it 
makes her happy, man up. 


e Lhenew year has arrived, and finding 
O love after taking a year off from online 


dating is on my list of resolutions. During my 
hiatus I dropped 20 pounds and got a promo- 
tion, so all that’s missing is the right woman to 
celebrate my good fortune with. But I feel rusty. 
Most women don’t like to chat for too long be- 
fore being asked out. How can I get to know a 
girl through only a few questions without her 
losing interest before I set up a first date? What 
red flags should I look for on a profile?—L.K., 
Encino, California 
As I’m currently writing a book that will 
O answer questions like yours, so ГП do 
my best with the CliffsNotes. In terms of start- 
ing a conversation, lead with something witty 
that shows you've read her profile. Follow up 
with asincere compliment; flattery will get you 
everywhere. The best way to get a first date is 
to ask if she's interested in something that in- 
terests you (old movies, hiking, bowling). Ifshe 
says yes, that's your cue to ask her out. 

Red flags depend on the individual. If 90 
percent of her profile pictures show her with 
alcohol, she might have a problem. But if 
90 percent of your profile references liquor, 
you'll probably be great drinking buddies 
(and recovery buddies too). Phrases such as 
not looking for anything serious aren't ideal. 
Some more generic warning signs: No bio? No 
bueno. The lack of effort reveals laziness or en- 
titlement. An overuse of emojis signals she's 
childish. Grammar errors drive me nuts, but 
I’m awriter. “Follow me on Instagram!” might 
as well read “I’m a narcissist!” She wants fol- 
lowers, not intimacy. Finally, Snapchat animal 
filters? Run away. 


e When my girlfriend and I became of- 
е ficial, we agreed to keep the relation- 


ship open. I have since “cashed in” about six 
times, and she has only once. She insists that 
it’s fine and that open relationships are about 
trust—but I’m starting to feel guilty. It’s hard 
to enjoy the freedom when I feel she’s not par- 
ticipating as much as I am. Will these feelings 
pass?—C.C., Birmingham, Alabama 

e You're not doing anything wrong, and 

€ you have no reason to feel guilty— 
unless you're lying to me (and her). An open 
relationship, especially your first, comes with 
growing pains. We're so conditioned to want 
monogamy that it's naturalfor you to feel guilty 
for “cashing in” more than she has. These feel- 
ings should subside, but there’s no timetable. 
I’m not suggesting you start sleeping with 
more people, but if your girlfriend is cool with 
it, stop robbing yourself of the joy and freedom 
of consensual nonmonogamy. People are wired 


differently; to your girlfriend, her one time 
may be the equivalent of your six times (un- 
less she’s lying about the number of times she’s 
cashed in). If your guilty feelings don’t pass, 
then you should stop sleeping with other peo- 
ple, because guess what: You're truly not okay 
with being in an open relationship. There’s no 
shame in admitting you're old school. 


Q: Iborrowed my boyfriend'siPad, and— 


O surprise! —hehadntcleared his search 
history. That led to my obsessively examining 
his porn-viewing habits. The good news is I 
didn't find anything that made me uncomfort- 
able. We joke a lot about watching porn when 
the other isn't around, but Id like to explore 
watching together. Have you ever brought this 
up with a lover?—M.P., Ottawa, Canada 
A: Is the pope Catholic? I love watching 

€ porn with a man, and I highly recom- 
mend it, not only to instigate sexy times but 
also to get a window into each other's deeper 
sexual yearnings. Realize, though, that you 
may learn things about your partner that you 
can't unknow. A few tips for beginners: Let 
the woman choose what you watch the first 
time. Don't let adult-film stars make you feel 
insecure—it's their job to have huge penises or 
fantastic-looking vaginas, bleached assholes 
and loud, over-the-top orgasms. And keep in 
mind that it's okay to spend more time critiqu- 
ing the film set'sthrow pillows than fixating on 
the actress’s double-Ds. Finally, atip for women 
readers: Never say, “Oh my God. I’ve never seen 
one that big in my life!” Just think it. 


Q: Ihave a question about lube. My friend 


O takes it personally when a woman 
reaches for it during sex. He thinks her in- 
sufficient wetness is some kind of biological 
commentary on his performance. What does 
science say?—D.S., Jacksonville, Florida 

Idon't need science to tell your friend 

Ф what I already know: A woman's wet- 
ness is not wholly based on her partner's per- 
formance. He shouldn't take the blame—or 
the credit. Like a man's ejaculate, a woman's 
wetness can vary day to day, hour to hour. It 
depends on many factors beyond her level of 
arousal—factors like hormones, time of cycle, 
mood, medications and genetics. I've become 
inexplicably wet for men who are bad for me, 
yet a good man I really like may not have the 
same effect. Scientists are still working to un- 
derstand the exact physiology, but the vagina 
wants what the vagina wants. It's not logical. 
Tell your friend to stop taking it personally 
and to pick up some Astroglide. 

Questions? E-mail advisor@playboy.com. 


33 


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POLITICS 


Coming to (Mid)Terms 


With both political parties fighting themselves even as they take ат at each other, it's 
shaping up to be another gonzo election year. Here’s what you need to know 


Every midterm election is a referendum 
on the party holding the White House, 
but this year’s cycle will be unusual for 
one reason: Civil wars are tearing at 
both parties, especially the one cur- 
rently controlling all three branches. 

With President Donald Trump poll- 
ing at historically low numbers, you’d 
think Democrats would have a golden 
opportunity to seize the Senate, where 
Republicans have a 52-48 majority, and 
an outside shot at recapturing the House, 
where the GOP enjoys a 241-194 edge. 
Some observers are forecasting a “wave” 
election, when voters break at the last 
minute toward one party, handing it a 
larger-than-expected victory. The post- 
Watergate 1974 midterm election saw 
Democrats net 49 House seats; in 1994 
Republicans netted 54 House seats, mak- 
ing Newt Gingrich Speaker of the House. 

But before any lefties get too excited, keep 
in mind that the Senate map actually favors 
Republicans. Just nine Republican seats are in 
play; of the seven incumbents up for reelection, 
only one, Nevada’s Dean Heller, appears to be 
an attractive Democratic Party target. Demo- 
cratic incumbents, on the other hand, are de- 
fending seats in 10 states Trump captured in 
2016, including five—Indiana, Montana, Mis- 
souri, North Dakota and West Virginia—that he 
won by double-digit margins. 

For their part, House Republicans have 
to defend many districts claimed by Hillary 
Clinton, including up to half a dozen seats in 
California—a state she won with 61.5 percent, 
racking up a 4.3 million-vote margin over 
Trump. And in 18 of the last 20 midterm elec- 
tions, the party holding the White House has 
sustained an average loss of 33 House seats. 

Two caveats throw those calculations up in 
the air. First, in the House, incumbents usually 
cruise to reelection because gerrymandering 
has made only a handful of seats competitive— 
perhaps as few as 30. Second, intraparty wars 
are muddying the political waters. The Republi- 
can combatants are a varied lot: In one foxhole sit 
those who, though they vote down the line with 
thepartyon policy, are suddenly wakinguptothe 


ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL ZENDER 


BY JONATHAN TASINI 


bellicose and often unhinged conduct of the chief 
executive. That wing is most notably represented 
in the Senate by Bob Corker and Jeff Flake—two 
incumbents who decided not to seek reelection 
because of their conflicts with Trump—and to a 
lesser extent by Susan Collins and John McCain. 
Flake’s retirement could put that seat in play. 

A more rebellious wing, mixing a murky brew 
of conservatism and white nationalism, is mus- 
tering elsewhere on the battlefield, declaring 
war on, as they see it, the Mitch McConnell 
“establishment.” Led by self-styled “populists” 
like Steve Bannon and financed by shadowy fig- 
ures like billionaire Robert Mercer, that wing is 
mounting primary challenges to Senate Repub- 
lican incumbents. 

What will become of these extremist wild 
cards? Last September saw the Bannon-favored 
Roy Moore win a cranky primary in Alabama, 
defeating McConnell’s (and, oddly enough, 
Trump’s) choice, incumbent Luther Strange. If 
more Republicans like Moore—who has deeply 
bigoted views and at press time is facing accusa- 
tions of sexual misconduct from five women— 
emerge as general-election candidates, they 
could lose, following the example of Todd Akin, 
whose theories about “legitimate rape” cost him 
the Missouri U.S. Senate election in 2012. Then 


again, ifever there were an environment 
where Moore’s ideology could flourish, 
it’s the one created by the current ad- 
ministration. 

The infighting among Democrats is 
relatively muted, if not resolved. In the 
days after Election Day 2016, the party 
was apparently headed for trench war- 
fare between the Clinton establishment 
and the ascendant progressive wing led 
by Bernie Sanders. Today, the party is in 
dire need of a shake-up. In the past de- 
cade, despite winning the White House 
twice in 2008 and 2012, it has lost more 
than 900 state legislative seats. 

But Donald Trump’s election—his 
mix of erratic behavior and deeply 
conservative gambits around health 
care and taxes—has put that fight on 
hold. To be sure, a few primary con- 
tests are in the offing, most notably a 
progressive Democratic challenge to Califor- 
nia senator Dianne Feinstein. But most Dem- 
ocrats seem willing to bury the hatchet until 
after the midterms, when they must begin 
the contentious process of choosing the par- 
ty’s 2020 nominee. 

And let’s not forget the gubernatorial battles. 
Republicans currently occupy 34 out of 50 gov- 
ernors’ mansions, including every one in the 
South. But with Trump’s unpopularity, we could 
see as many as six contests favoring the Dem- 
ocrats, along with scores of legislative seats. 
That’s significant because, circling back to 
the gerrymandering issue, governors and state 
legislatures control the once-every-decade re- 
drawing of the congressional maps. Whoever 
runs state politics after the 2020 census will be 
inastrong position to define the outlines of fed- 
eral power for the following decade. 

After Ше 2016 election, Ше political- 
prognosticating business should have withered. 
So perhaps the best guidepost to guessing elec- 
tion outcomes is to follow that contest’s twisted 
logic: The victorious party might once again 
be the most effective “the system is broken” 
messenger—even if those delivering that mes- 
sage are funded by Ше same corporate donors and 
elites who broke the system in the first place. № 


36 


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38 


PLAYBOY CLUB 


COMING SOON 


SPORTS 


LEVELING 


THE 


PLAYING FIELD 


From the court to the sidelines to the owner's box, women are fighting for airtime, 
equal pay and a culture free of discrimination—and logging some major wins 


“You play like a girl.” 

I heard this time and again as a kid on Gal- 
lup, New Mexico’s only golf course, where I 
was the only girl golfer. Men found it cute 
that I played from what were then called the 
“men’s tees,” but I prac- 
ticed every day to move 
from cute to great. My 
dad taught me to swing 
the club hard and use every fiber of my frame, 
and by the age of 11 I could drive the ball 
nearly 200 yards. Soon I was beating the men. 

My talent and hard work eventually earned 
me a full-ride scholarship to the University 
of Washington, and I later qualified for the 
LPGA, playing in two U.S. Opens. Yet even as 
a professional golfer, I struggled to be taken 
seriously. It’s a common sentiment among 
women in sports, whose obstacles are a re- 
flection of those faced by women in general: 
pay inequality, sexual harassment, prejudice. 

Protest in professional sports has been a 
national debate for nearly two years now, and 
with outsize figures from Colin Kaepernick 
to Vice President Mike Pence dominating the 
headlines, it’s easy to overlook the fact that 
a WNBA team used its platform to speak out 
against the killings of Philando Castile and 
Alton Sterling a month before Kap’s first pro- 
test, and that female World Cup soccer player 
Megan Rapinoe was the first white athlete 
to take a knee during the National Anthem. 
Along with this increasingly clear shift to- 
ward political consciousness in sports, a cul- 
ture of unprecedented feminism and activism 
in women’s pro athletics has taken root. 


sr ANYA 
ALVAREZ 


“We're used to people talking shit about 

us,” says Seattle Storm point guard Sue Bird, 
who just wrapped up her 15th season in the 
WNBA. “We’re used to having to go against 
the naysayers and prove them wrong over and 
over again.” 
The modern history of sports is dotted with 
stories of women standing up for the right 
to play. In most cases they are exceptions, 
albeit inspiring 
ones, to the rule of 
institutionalized 
sexism. Kathrine 
Switzer became 
the first woman 
to complete the 
Boston Marathon 
as а numbered 
entry in 1967, 
under the gender- 
neutral name K.V. 
Switzer. When a 
race official real- 
ized a woman was 
running, he tried 
to chase Switzer down, yelling, “Get the hell 
out of my race and give me those numbers!” 
Five years later women were granted the right 
to run the marathon. Diane Crump, the first 
female jockey to ride in the Kentucky Derby, 
in 1970, was met with scorn at previous races, 
having to fight off mobs of men protesting 
her presence. 

The most famous (or at least most colorful) 
case of awoman athlete having to prove herself 


Seattle Storm point guard Sue Bird leads her 
team onto the court last year. 


is the 1973 tennis match, dubbed the “Battle 
of the Sexes,” between Billie Jean King and 
Bobby Riggs, who had mocked women players 
as inferior. Riggs was the five-to-two favorite 
to win what The New York Times called “the 
most talked about event in the history of ten- 
nis,” but King won handily in straight sets. 
Her victory, televised during prime time and 
viewed by an estimated 90 million people, 
led to greater acceptance not only of women’s 
tennis and women 
in sports but of the 
idea of women’s 
equality. King re- 
alized she had a 
platform and be- 
came an outspo- 
ken advocate for 
equal pay and 
abortion rights. 
“I wanted to use 
sports for social 
change," she said. 

But the most im- 
pactful change for 
women in sports 
took place in 1972 when Title IX, which 
prohibits sex-based discrimination at ed- 
ucational institutions that receive federal 
funding, became law. After decades of lop- 
sided funding, a whole new world opened for 
women’s athletics. Suddenly middle schools 
and high schools were offering sports pro- 
grams for girls, and colleges were providing 
athletic scholarships to young women. Before 
the legislation, one in 27 high school girls 


ILLUSTRATION BY JONAS BERGSTRAND 


40 


Shelly Vincent and Heather Hardy in the thick of their 2016 fight at the Ford Amphitheater in Coney Island, New York. 


played sports. Now that number is two in five, 
according to the Women's Sports Foundation. 
And in the wake of Title IX, more profes- 
sional women's leagues have been created, 
giving female athletes more opportunities to 
make a living. (Billie Jean King founded the 
Women's Tennis Association in 1973.) 
Despite the doors that opened for women 
in sports more than 40 years ago, the playing 
field remains wildly uneven. Women's sports 
receive only four percent of all sports media 
coverage, according to the Tucker Center for 
Research on Girls & Women in Sport, and 
women athletes still earn considerably smaller 
paychecks than their male counterparts. In 
2014 the U.S. men's national soccer team re- 
ceived $9 million for their disappointing 
round-16 World Cup loss; the following year, 
when the U.S. women's team won the World 
Cup, they earned only $2 million. That wom- 
en's final match was, incidentally, the most- 
watched game in the history of U.S. soccer. 
These inequalities are pushing women in 
sports to speak out and demand changes. 
But how exactly do you take on a culture as en- 
trenched as professional sports? I spoke with 
a number of women who have turned their 
passion and anger into action—and results. 
World champion boxer and Bellator mixed- 
martial-arts fighter Heather Hardy, 35, 
quickly made a name for herself in com- 
bat sports. She earned the coveted Golden 


Gloves after just one year of training, fought 
in her first professional match that same 
year and secured 19 victories in the five 
years that followed. 

Women's fights are rarely televised, so when 
Hardy learned that her August 2016 match 
against Shelly Vincent would be Premier Box- 
ing Champions' first nationally televised 
female undercard, she thought it might be a 
turning point. But in reality it had little im- 
pact. “My fight was on tape delay four hours 
later on NBC Sports," Hardy says, speaking 
over the phone during a break in training at a 
Brooklyn gym. *They came in my locker room 
and said, “We're going to have you fight after 
the main event because we don’t want your fans 
toleave while Errol Spence Jr. is fighting. " 

As a result, there were fewer TV viewers for 
Hardy's fight, which she won after 10 rounds. 
But the greater injustice was the $150,000 
that Spence took home that night—15 times 
the $10,000 Hardy received. 

That moment spurred Hardy to act. Her 
first priority: to pressure television networks 
to improve opportunities for female fight- 
ers. ^They make a lot of excuses," she says. 
"They'll say, ‘Well, there's no demand for 
women’s fights’ or ‘We don’t get ratings for 
it.’ Give me a break. When you put a woman's 
face on at 11 0’clock at night on Fox Sports 38, 
of course it’s not going to get ratings.” 

Hardy points to Ronda Rousey as proof 
that women fighters can not only get good 


“IT MAKES 
PROMOTERS 
AND TELEVISION 
NETWORKS 
UNCOMFORT- 
ABLE WHEN A 
WOMAN IN THE 
SPOTLIGHT 

IS CALLING 
THEM OUT.” 


ratings but can also make a living. Rousey 
has made millions in the UFC thanks to 
her popular televised fights. Broadcast ex- 
posure can make a huge difference, and not 
just through TV viewers: After one of Har- 
dy's Bellator matches was televised, her In- 
stagram followers shot from 16,000 to more 
than 50,000. That translates into money for 
Hardy because sponsors want athletes with 
large followings. 

And with a larger fan base, Hardy can in 
turn make a convincing case that women in 
boxing deserve to have their fights televised. 
Hardy is also aware that with more people pay- 
ingattention, her actions have greater impact. 

“If I have a voice and a platform, it’s my re- 
sponsibility to speak for all the girls who are 
world champions and who are fighting for 
$100 around,” she says. “It's about creating a 
space where things are equal for women, and 
it's not equal for women in boxing.” 

Hardy says her requests have led to some 
awkward encounters. “It makes promoters 
uncomfortable and it makes the television 
networks uncomfortable when a woman in 
the spotlight is calling them out,” she says. 
“They expect that woman to be quiet because 
she's the lucky one.” 

But until women in boxing are given equal 
opportunities, Hardy says, she won't stay 
quiet: “No freedom till we're equal.” 


It's not just athletes who are taking action. 


42 


Ginny Gilder, Dawn Trudeau and Lisa 
Brummel own the Seattle Storm, one of just 
two all-female-owned WNBA teams, and 
they use that platform to support women’s 
issues. Holding a pregame rally in July 2017 
to raise money for Planned Parenthood was a 
natural move. 

“T think we all need to use our voice when 
we see things being done that we consider 
unjust or unfair,” says Trudeau, a former 
Microsoft executive. The Planned Parent- 
hood event raised more than $40,000 for the 
reproductive-health nonprofit and, perhaps 
more important, demonstrated what can be 
accomplished when women occupy top posi- 
tions off the court. 

For Trudeau, co-owning a women’s basket- 
ball team is deeply linked to her desire to fos- 
ter equality. “Part of why we got involved [in 
owning the team] is because we really want op- 
portunities for women and girls, toshow them 
they can have different kinds of careers that 
are nontraditional. We wouldn’t have done 
this if there wasn’t a social-justice aspect to 
it,” she says. Trudeau pauses, then adds, “In 
some ways, the very fact of being a woman in 
sports makes you an activist by nature.” 

“The WNBA is filled with women who have 
had to fight just to be where they are in the 
league,” says point guard Bird. “So it’s really 
only natural for us to have other people’s 
backs as well and to continue that fight.” 

Recent years have seen small but important 
shifts for women entering sports spaces tradi- 
tionally held by men, helping to set the stage 
for future generations of women. Alison Over- 
holt became the first woman to helm a na- 
tional general-interest sports magazine when 
she became editor in chief of ESPN the Mag- 
azine in 2016. Dawn Hudson, who took over 
as the NFL’s chief marketing officer in 2014, 
spearheaded the inaugural NFL Women’s 
Summit in 2016—during which commis- 
sioner Roger Goodell announced steps to 
ensure that women be considered for execu- 
tive positions. The NFL also hired Samantha 
Rapoport to bring more women into the or- 
ganization. These women in part stand on 
the shoulders of those who have come before, 
including Sheila Johnson, the only African 
American woman to have ownership in three 
professional teams (the NBA’s Washington 
Wizards, the NHL’s Washington Capitals and 
the WNBA's Washington Mystics). 

With the increased representation of 
women in sports, Seattle Storm co-owner 
Trudeau is optimistic about the future. “I love 
that a little girl can now turn on the televi- 
sion or go to an arena and see women playing 


hd 


professional basketball or can getinto a field 
and see women playing professional soccer,” 
she says. “That has not always been the case, 
and I think that's going to continue to drive 
a positive change for our young girls in what 
they believe is possible.” 

The range of women in sports who are using 
their experiences to empower others goes 
even further, beyond athletes, owners and 
employees : Women in the media have joined 
the fray too. 

Laura Okmin has worked as a sideline re- 
porter for almost two decades—long enough 
to witness the cycle of experienced talent 
being replaced by young reporters who lack 
depth of knowledge in the sport they're cov- 
ering. So when Okmin was benched for a few 
games during the 2015 football season—a 
younger and less experienced reporter tak- 
ing her place—she knew it was time for ac- 
tion. She started GALvanize, a boot camp to 
equip young women 
for careers as sports 
reporters. The move 
both expanded her 
career and created a 
durable solution to 
the problem of unpre- 
pared newbies. 

"I was meeting so 
many young women 
on a football field 
or at other big ven- 
ues, like the Olym- 
pics, where they were 
hired to report from,” 
says Okmin. “And 
every time I would 
ask ‘How many times 
have you been down 
here?’ their answer 
was zero.” The boot 
camp teaches stu- 
dents on-camera in- 
terviewing skills and how to network and 
build professional relationships with players 
and coaches. It also preps them on how to deal 
with the inevitable on-the-job sexism. 

Okmin values the fresh perspective young 
reporters bring to the field but doesn't want 
that to negate the advantages older women 
bring to sports journalism. 

"Ive never been better with my rela- 
tionships. I've never been better with my 
knowledge. I've never been better with 
my confidence. I've never been better as a 
teacher. I've never been better, period," she 
says. "Itry toteach the women that they need 


43 


to build a career, not а job, and one that will 
hopefully last decades, not years." 

Perhaps what's happening today in women's 
sports is just as pivotal аз the passage of Title 
IX. Female athletes are not afraid to call out 
injustices and have gained support for being 
vocal. Girls who witness women refusing to 
accept the status quo will in turn expect bet- 
ter treatment for themselves. 

“Having a little girl see a strong and power- 
ful athlete speaking up on social issues gives 
that girl permission to do that on her own,” 
says Trudeau. 

Jessica Mendoza, an Olympic gold medalist 
softball player and ESPN’s first female Major 
League Baseball analyst, feels optimistic about 
the wave of female athletes raising their voices 
to bring awareness to inequalities. She points 
to the latest round of contract negotiations for 
the U.S. women’s soccer team: Players’ base pay 
and game bonuses were boosted, and their per 


Left: Jessica Mendoza playing for the U.S. softball team. 
Right: Sideline reporter and GALvanize founder Laura Okmin at work. 


diem stipends were raised to match their male 
counterparts’. And in March 2017 the U.S. wom- 
en’s ice hockey team threatened to boycott the 
world championships if pay inequalities were 
not addressed. Their last-minute agreement 
with USA Hockey improved compensation and 
benefits for the players. Ten days later, they won 
their fourth straight world championship. 

“It’s been a long time coming, but women 
just want to have more of a voice,” Mendoza 
says. “They want a seat at the table. They want 
equal pay. And that’s not just in sports.” 

So maybe in the future, playing like a girl 
won't seem like such a bad thing. B 


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PLAYBOY 
INTERVIEW: 


Y 


RISTIE 
FNER 


A candid conversation with Playboy Enterprise’s former president and CEO 
on working alongside her father and journeying beyond the world of Playboy 


In the summer of 1982 news broke that 
29-year-old, Brandeis University-educated 
Christie Hefner, the first child of Hugh 
Hefner, had been appointed president of 
Playboy Enterprises, the $389 million com- 
pany launched almost 30 years before by her 
father. The announcement raised eyebrows 
and red flags. For all her smarts and poise, 
was she up to the task? Would she actually be 
given any real power by her 56-year-old father, 
who owned 70 percent of the company stock 
and whose take on sex, social justice, pop cul- 
ture and the high life marked every page of the 
magazine he created in 1953? She, a commit- 
ted feminist, wanted the magazine and the 
company to reflect the shifting cultural tide. 
Surely an epic clash of wills was imminent, 
one that could even bring down the whole 
Playboy empire. 


Criticism came thick and fast—some of 
it veiled, some not. One national magazine 
patronizingly crowned her “the Princess of 
Playboy.” Depending on the viewpoint (and 
prejudices) of the observer, Christie Hefner 
was too young, too inexperienced, too pretty, 
too much of a feminist, too conservative or, 
perhaps most glaring of all, too buttoned- 
down in dress, demeanor and mind-set, 
especially compared with her rock-star fa- 
ther. Meanwhile, the company was hemor- 
rhaging cash. Recently lost were the British 
gambling clubs that had accounted for more 
than a whopping 80 percent of the company’s 
profits, roughly $39 million yearly. (Due to 
charges of “technical credit violations” in 
1981, the company was unable to renew some 
of its licenses, forcing the sale of five casi- 
nos and 80 betting houses.) Led by Christie 


Hefner, the company began long-term but 
dramatic restructuring and belt-tightening, 
retiring a number of top executives, signifi- 
cantly cutting other staff and closing or sell- 
ing a handful of divisions. 

Still, despite the fact that Christie had no 
MBA nor any business experience outside 
Playboy, she radiated unflappable intelligence 
and self-possession when telling reporters 
that she fully expected profits from PLAYBOY 
magazine and new cable-TV ventures to take 
up at least some of the slack. In 1988 she was 
made chairman of the board and chief exec- 
utive officer. For a total of 26 years, some of 
them undeniably turbulent, she ran the busi- 
ness alongside her father, who often referred 
to her as “Corporate” or “Chicago.” Publicly, 
she didn’t let that faze her. In 1991 she an- 
nounced that she would be with Playboy for 


“At certain points when I became an adult 
we might have talked about relationships, 
though, candidly, I was probably trying to 
secretly give him relationship advice.” 


"Iremember reading an answer to a question 
in Playboy Advisor in the early 1980s that was 
so stunning: ‘She has the right to say no even 
if she has her panties off.” 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAKE CHESSUM 


45 


“Гое told Barbi many times that he became a 
richer, better person in the years of that re- 
lationship. I used to tease her and say, You 
know, we could borrow each other's clothes." ? 


life, but in 2009 she stepped down. She wasted 
no time in reestablishing herself as a high 
achiever in the public and nonprofit sectors. 

Born Christie Ann Hefner in Chicago on 
November 8, 1952, she is the older of the 
two children of Hugh Marston Hefner and 
Mildred Williams. Mildred, a former Eng- 
lish teacher and Hef's college sweetheart, 
separated from Hef when Christie was four 
and her brother, David, was one. (The latter, 
a computer consultant, has long avoided the 
limelight.) After her parents divorced and 
her mother married Chicagolawyer Ed Gunn 
in 1960, Christie, her brother and her mother 
relocated to leafy, upper-middle-class subur- 
ban Wilmette, Illinois. Several times yearly 
a limousine would whisk Christie back to 
Chicago for a visit with her father at the 
Playboy Mansion; in the main, that was the 
extent of their face-to-face contact. Mean- 
while, Mildred's marriage to Gunn 
didn'ttake and, to put it mildly, nei- 
ther Christie nor David took to him. 
They too divorced; Mildred re-wed 
and has been happily married for 
nearly 40 years. 

Nevertheless, as Christie Gunn 
and a top student active in theater 
and music, she graduated from New 
Trier West High School and went 
on to major in English at Brandeis 
University, near Boston. Elected in 
her junior year to Phi Beta Kappa, 
she graduated summa cum laude 
in English and American litera- 
ture. Thinking she might pursue 
law, journalism or public service, 
she decided to move to Boston her 
first postgrad year, working as a 
freelance writer for magazines and 
the alternative newspaper The Bos- 
ton Phoenix to see whether journal- 
ism was the best fit. From there she 
got swept up in the world of Playboy and not 
only made a success of it but also launched the 
Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Awards in 
her father’s honor. 

While serving as Playboy’s CEO, she helped 
raise $30 million for Chicago’s CORE Cen- 
ter for people with AIDS. Post-Playboy she 
has taken on advisory or executive roles at 
Canyon Ranch Enterprises, HatchBeauty 
and the $3 billion agricultural conglomerate 
RDO Equipment Co. She has also stumped 
for progressive political candidates, par- 
ticularly women, and has worked with the 
Center for American Progress, a nonparti- 
san think tank, since 2009. In 1995 she mar- 
ried former Illinois state senator William A. 
Marovitz, a real estate developer and attor- 
ney; 16 years later, Marovitz settled a Securi- 
ties and Exchange Commission lawsuit that 
accused him of making roughly $100,000 by 
illegally buying Playboy stock, trading on 
confidential corporate information gleaned 


Y 


from his wife—who had repeatedly warned 
him against acting on that information. (The 
couple separated in 2011 and later divorced.) 

Today Christie remains close with her 
brother, David, 62, and her two half-brothers: 
Cooper Hefner, the 26-year-old chief creative 
officer of Playboy Enterprises, and 27-year- 
old Marston Hefner, who writes under the 
name Marston Glenn and is the author of a 
collection of postapocalyptic zombie tales 
called Bleed. The four of them gathered for 
dinner in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los 
Angeles atthe end of September the day after 
their father died, unexpectedly and of natu- 
ral causes, at the Mansion. 

We sent Stephen Rebello, whose last 
Playboy Interview was with Patton Oswalt, 
to Chicago, where he interviewed Hefner in 
her Michigan Avenue offices. Says Rebello, 
"Christie Hefner is brisk, articulate and 


There's no *It's 
good enough” for 
me. There's just 
an unyielding 
commitment to 
trying to be the 
best, do the best. 


businesslike. Fiercely loyal to her father 
and his legacy, she is a study in poise and 
boundary-setting, especially on what she 
will and won't discuss—hence the long phone 
call she requested before agreeing to this in- 
terview. But she is also very much a griev- 
ing daughter. More than once when talking 
about her father, her eyes welled and her crisp 
speech pattern grew momentarily hesitant. 
WhatIcame away with was far more precious 
than tabloid fodder; during our time together 
she gave refreshingly personal insights on 
Hef as a father, mentor and boss—and some 
powerful life lessons about finding yourself 
even if you grew up in the shadow of such a 
towering figure. 

"Tacked onto a board behind Christie's 
desk are two photocopied black-and-white 
images. In one, she and Hef beam at each 
other; in the other, her father, in close-up, 
looks raffish, rascally and faraway. It was al- 
most as if Hef himself were monitoring us 


46 


both over his daughter's left shoulder. It was 
unsettling and somehow oddly comforting at 
the same time." 


PLAYBOY: For years you ve turned down offers to 
write an autobiography and declined more than 
afew invitations to do the Playboy Interview. 
HEFNER: I am fundamentally a private 
person. I wouldn’t choose to share in a book 
things about my working relationship with 
my father or my personal life that I consider 
intimate. IfI had agreed to do a memoir or an 
autobiography, it would have become acheat. 
Way too many people think they need to write 
a book and that the world is interested in 
hearing about their life. I had a very clever 
agent once say to me, “Which is exactly why 
you should write a book—because you have 
that kind of insight.” I thought, Well played, 
sir, well played. 

PLAYBOY: Well played, but still 
no sale. This time, though, you’ve 
agreed to an interview. 

HEFNER: I wouldn’t have said yes 
were it not on the heels of my fa- 
ther’s death and had there been no 
element of tribute. In all likelihood 
I wouldn’t have said yes if Cooper 
hadn’t asked me. But I also wouldn’t 
have said yes if I hadn't felt comfort- 
able about the phone conversation 
you and I had beforehand. 
PLAYBOY: Hugh Hefner's death 
unleashed, and keeps unleashing, 
reminiscences, reappraisals, ap- 
preciation and virulent criticism 
from all over the world. As a col- 
league of his for decades observed, 
"The ones who knew and under- 
stand him the least are writing the 
most." How are you coping with the 
loss of your father? 

HEFNER: Well, it's still very new 
and I’m still very early in it. I don’t think I'm 
in a position to be helpful on coping strate- 
gies for grief. Ihave been helped indirectly by 
the many things I have had to attend to, like 
planning the memorial celebration we had 
for close friends in Los Angeles and a memo- 
rial celebration here in Chicago. I was asked 
to write a tribute for the magazine, which I 
did. I've also been overwhelmed by the out- 
pouring of kindness in e-mails, cards and 
flowers. Fora while there it looked likeIcould 
open a florist's shop. 

PLAYBOY: How often were you able to see him 
in recent years? 

HEFNER: I saw my father once a month, when 
Iwould go out to Los Angeles. So ina funny way 
I'm not having to face his absence on a day-to- 
day basis. I know he's gone, but it's like, ^Well, 
I'm coming back to Los Angeles next month, 
so....” I'm not looking forward to going back 
to the house. On certain levels, the reality of 
it will sink in more over time, especially on 


occasions or at events I would have shared with 
him or have shared with him in the past, and 
now he won't be there. 

PLAYBOY: From what other sources are you 
drawing support? 

HEFNER: The man I’m seeing has just been a 
rock and wonderful. We're fortunate in my fam- 
ily because we really have three families: my 
brother, David, and me; the two boys, Cooper 
and Marston, from my dad's second marriage; 
and my dad's wife, Crystal. There's huge mutual 
respect and love among all of us, so that's a kind 
of funny support system, even though every- 
body has a different kind of grief. I feel for the 
boys, because they had their dad for far fewer 
years than David and I did, and of 
course Crystal lost a husband. It’s 
not the same, but underlying it all 
we lost the same person whom we 
loved. The fact that we’re close and 
care so much about each other is 
a huge plus, and it’s something he 
knew when he was alive. 
PLAYBOY: How did you feel when 
photographers shot you and your 
siblings out dining together at a 
Brentwood restaurant the night 
after your father died? 

HEFNER: That was bizarre. That’s 
L.A., though. I had organized the 
siblings’ dinner, as we called it, 
and we were going to have a fam- 
ily dinner, including Crystal, the 
next night, which we did. I thought 
it would be nice to go out with the 
boys. We were standing on the side- 
walk and were suddenly swarmed 
by paparazzi. I said as we were leav- 
ing the restaurant that I was sure it 
was because people follow Cooper, 
who is more visible with the com- 
pany and all. 

PLAYBOY: What changes did you 
observe in your father in his later 
years? 

HEFNER: He was not a person of 
regrets. Honestly, even when he 
sometimes behaved regrettably, 
he was not good that way. Consequently, he 
wasn't apt to have a would-have, could-have, 
should-have attitude about things. How he 
definitely changed was he found it much eas- 
ier to express how important people were to 
him and how much he loved them—not just 
with family but with other people he was close 
to. He was always a romantic, but that mostly 
manifested in his personal romantic relation- 
ships, as it would normally. That softer side 
didn't manifest itself so much in his profes- 
sional relationships. He was not the kind of 
person to quickly say to someone who worked 
for him, “Greatjob” or “I really appreciate the 
effort you put into that project.” He was always 
fundamentally a kind person, and I don't want 
to say he became kinder or gentler, because һе 


Y 


т 


was never not those things. But as he got older, 
he became a softer version of himself. Maybe 
he came to realize how fundamental and es- 
sential human relationships are at the end 
of the day and how they’re to be honored and 
treasured, and part of that is expressing what 
they mean to you. 

PLAYBOY: Did you and David, both very 
young at the time, suffer because of your par- 
ents’ divorce? 

HEFNER: Candidly, no, because our parents 
were already separated by the time I was four. 
David was an infant. I was seven when they di- 
vorced. I’m sure it would have been quite differ- 
ent if I had been 13 and they'd been together. I 


never lived with my dad. My mother, I have to 
say, was incredible. 

PLAYBOY: How so? 

HEFNER: Г came to appreciate this only in 
hindsight, but she always emphasized that 
the fact that the marriage hadn’t worked had 
nothing to do with how much our father loved 
us and wanted to always be in our lives. Some- 
times children feel that if they had done 
something differently or better their parents 
would have stayed together and that some- 
how they caused the divorce. And then there 
are other parental dynamics in divorce where 
the kids become pawns and each parent says 
terrible things about the other in front of the 
kids, which is horrible. But my mother was just 
great about that. 


47 


PLAYBOY: What is your mother like? 
HEFNER: I believe the best qualities I have 
came from her. In no particular order, she was 
very engaged in politics; she was a Democratic 
poll judge almost every election, and from the 
time I was little she took me canvassing door- 
to-door for candidates. I got interested in poli- 
tics when I was very young. She was an English 
teacher and is an avid reader. From the begin- 
ning her attitude was that any book or mag- 
azine in the house or in the library was fine 
to read. She’s a wonderful cook, and I learned 
that from her. 

PLAYBOY: Several writers have depicted you 
as achild abandoned by a father consumed with 
building his empire. How much 
did your father actually make you 
a part of his life? 

HEFNER: Growing up, I thought 
of him kind of like a favorite 
uncle—someone I knew abso- 
lutely loved me and would be there 
for me but not someone who knew 
who my friends were or what I was 
interested in. I would see him a 
handful of times a year. We went 
for birthdays and Christmas. 
PLAYBOY: At the 74-room, 
20,000-square-foot Playboy Man- 
sion in Chicago, where he lived 
from 1959 through the mid-1970s 
before relocating to Playboy Man- 
sion West in Los Angeles? 
HEFNER: That’s right. Those 
visits were lots of fun. It was like 
achild’s dream because the house 
had a huge game room. To me it 
was a game house, with a pool 
table and a Ping-Pong table, and 
you didn’t have to put quarters 
in the pinball machines. Every 
game he owned had a board next 
to it where you put up the leading 
scores. Everybody competed to 
get on or move up the board. He 
would get the newest games, so 
that was the first time I saw Pong, 
Pac-Man, Frogger and Donkey 
Kong. We'd have a lovely dinner and conver- 
sation, and then we would play games. He was 
highly competitive with me and I with him. 
PLAYBOY: In what ways are you most like Hef? 
HEFNER: It’s different now than it might 
have been 20 or 40 years ago, but I would say 
my competitiveness, my almost unending de- 
sire to make it the best it can be, whatever the 
“it” is, whether it’s wrapping a birthday pres- 
ent or helping develop a strategy for a com- 
pany. There’s no “It’s good enough” for me. 
There's just an unyielding commitment to try- 
ing to be the best, do the best. 

My parents weren't married that long, but 
there’s a reason they were attracted to each 
other. In addition to their progressive political 
views, we have very much the same wickedly 


dark sense of humor. I could easily finish a lot 
of my father’s sentences, and either of us could 
take something and turn it into a quip. I think 
of myself as a very loyal friend. 

PLAYBOY: There had to be times when you 
just wanted more time with him, among 
other things. 

HEFNER: When I was younger I was less for- 
giving of his shortcomings than I became as 
I got older. I’ve had this conversation with 
friends who have had challenging relation- 
ships with one or another parent. The only 
thing I can say is what I feel: The other per- 
son isn’t going to change. That is who they are. 
With someone who is genuinely abusive or abad 
person, you should just get out of town. But if 
they’re being the best person they know how to 
be, then you have to decide if there isn’t much 
there you can love and not become consumed 
with what they’re not able to give you. 
PLAYBOY: How did you react to your 
father’s relationship with Barbi Ben- 
ton from 1969 to 1976? She was born 
only two years before you. 

HEFNER: He met her in 1969, my 
last year of many at the National 
Music Camp at Interlochen, in Mich- 
igan, where I was involved in music 
and drama. I remember being there 
and reading newspaper stories about 
him going to Europe, where she was 
shooting a movie. As a girl I was a 
little suspicious of her and slow to 
warm up. I don’t think it had to do 
with anything in particular that I 
didn’t like about her. My dad was 
very youthful, so I don't think it had 
much to do with the age difference. 
I just remember thinking, as I did 
when my mom began dating the won- 
derful man she has been with for 40 
years now: Is this a good person and 
agood relationship? Barbi and I have 
actually become quite good friends. 
PLAYBOY: You were almost thinking like a 
protective parent whose kid is dating. 
HEFNER: It took 10 years, but I came to un- 
derstand that she was a wonderful influence 
on him. She got him to travel and broaden his 
horizons in ways he hadn't before. I’ve told 
Barbi many times that he became aricher, bet- 
ter person in the years of that relationship. I 
used to tease her and say, “You know, we could 
borrow each other's clothes.” 

PLAYBOY: What do you remember most about 
growing up in the village of Wilmette, Illinois, 
about 14 miles from downtown Chicago? 
HEFNER: The music ofthe 1960s was my high- 
school soundtrack. I remember a large framed 
photo of Ringo Starr that my father got for me, 
which was kind of cute because the Beatles had 
visited the Chicago Mansion. They might have 
stayed the night, but I'm not positive. I strongly 
suspect that Bobbie Arnstein, my father's 
long-time executive assistant and right-hand 


Y 


person, said to him, *You should get something 
for Christie. She's a teenager and this is the 
Beatles." How my father wound up with Ringo, 
Ihave no idea. I was actually a Paul person. 
PLAYBOY: What was your classroom role? 
HEFNER: I was the one whose hand shot up all 
the time when the teacher asked a question. I 
loved school. I met many of my friends, par- 
ticularly from New Trier West High School in 
Northfield, Illinois, because we were in shows 
together. I started in fifth grade, playing the 
title role in Sleeping Beauty, all en francais. 
In high school I had a small role in Ionesco's 
Rhinoceros and a much bigger role in Noél 
Coward's Blithe Spirit. I spent six summers at 
Interlochen, playing Daisy Mae in 177 Abner 
and Luisa in The Fantasticks and singing in a 
number of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. I was 
wise enough to know that I didn't have the level 
of talent it takes to make it a career. 


When I went to 
work at the com- 
pany I’m quite 
sure my dad did 
not expect me to 
stay, never mind 
run it someday. 


PLAYBOY: What kind of trouble did you get 
into as ayoung woman? 

HEFNER: We were reading Thoreau’s Civil 
Disobedience in a high school advanced Eng- 
lish class. At the time, girls couldn’t wear 
slacks to school. It was already seen as silly, 
but the rules hadn’t changed. I said to the eight 
other young women in the class, “We're read- 
ing Civil Disobedience. Let’s all show up in 
slacks tomorrow. What are they going to do?” 
Five girls showed up in slacks, and I got sent 
to the principal’s office—the other girls had 
brought skirts to change into. My mother was 
called, and she thought I was in the right and 
they were in the wrong. I had an intellectual de- 
bate with the principal, who said, “If we didn’t 
have dress codes, the students might show up in 
bathing suits.” I remember saying, “Honestly, 
it would be incredibly uncomfortable being in 
school all day ina bathing suit, so I doubt that’s 
a genuine worry.” 

PLAYBOY: You were known as Christie Gunn 


48 


in those years. Did any of your friends know 
Hef was your dad? 

HEFNER: I had my sweet 16 party at the Man- 
sion, so my 14 closest girlfriends knew. 
PLAYBOY: Did any friends avoid associating 
with the daughter of Mr. Playboy? 

HEFNER: Not in any way that blew back on 
me or that I was conscious of. When my best 
girlfriend from grammar school and I went 
out to lunch years later, she told me that when 
we were in third grade, she was at home hav- 
ing dinner with her parents and somehow the 
subject of work and dads came up. She told 
them, “You know, Cindy’s dad is a doctor, 
and Christie's dad is the editor of PLAYBOY...” 
PLAYBOY was just a name to her; she could 
easily have said he was the editor of National 
Review. She told me that her father had said to 
her, “You shouldn't believe all the things your 
little friends tell you.” 

PLAYBOY: When boyfriends en- 
tered the picture, did you ever find 
yourself having to introduce them 
not only to your father but also to 
your mother and stepfather? 
HEFNER: My high school boy- 
friend certainly knew my mom and 
Ed Gunn, but I don't believe he ever 
came to dinner with my dad. Once 
I got into high school, I don’t re- 
member bringing any boyfriends 
to meet my father. 

PLAYBOY: Did you ever seek or re- 
ceive relationship advice from your 
father? 

HEFNER: Not when I was younger, 
but we talked about religion and poli- 
tics. At certain points when I became 
an adult we might have talked about 
relationships, though, candidly, I 
was probably trying to secretly give 
him relationship advice under the 
guise of discussing relationships. 
PLAYBOY: Did you have a lot of boyfriends? 
HEFNER: I wasn’t allowed to date until I was 
16. That was my stepfather’s edict. My mother 
took me to get the birth control pill when I was 
a freshman in college. I had a very open rela- 
tionship with my mother. There were a cou- 
ple of guys I went out with a couple of times, 
but pretty quickly I was “going steady,” as 
we would say back then, with the same guy 
through high school. I met my college boy- 
friend, Paul, very early in my freshman year. 
We fell in love and lived together for three 
years, and then we were acouple during my se- 
nior year even though he was in his first year 
at Georgetown Law. 

PLAYBOY: In 1974 you graduated from 
Brandeis, worked at Playboy over the summer 
and then moved to Boston. What career path 
did you have in mind? 

HEFNER: My long-range plan was to apply to 
Yale’s combination law and public policy grad- 
uate program. My dream was to wind up on 


the Supreme Court or in the Senate. Part of 
the divorce decree was that our dad would pay 
for whatever colleges we got into. I had no in- 
terest in Radcliffe, where my mother thought 
she’d like me to go. A friend of mine, the televi- 
sion and film director Ed Zwick, was going to 
Harvard and suggested Brandeis: liberal arts, 
great academics, coed, close to Boston. I loved it. 
I changed my last name to Hefner the sum- 
mer before my senior year. I’d been elected to 
Phi Beta Kappa my junior year. I had this idea 
that the certificate would be important to me 
and it would have my name on it, and I didn't 
have warm fuzzy feelings about my stepfather. 
Whatever the challenges of navi- 
gatingthe world with a famous last 
name, it seemed about the safest 
environment to make the change. 
SoIwentto court and changed my 
name to Christie Ann Hefner. 
PLAYBOY: Rather than head 
straight to grad school, you wrote 
film reviews for the alternative 
newspaper The Boston Phoenix. 
HEFNER: I thought I'd work as a 
journalist for a year before I con- 
sidered graduate school. I liked 
journalism and got accepted into 
Radcliffe's publishing program. In 
my imagination I was going to be 
the next Ellen Goodman, a colum- 
nist who could write about serious 
and important issues but in a per- 
sonal way. Maureen Dowd would be 
today's version. 
PLAYBOY: What happened? 
HEFNER: I was visiting my dad, 
and I told him about the Rad- 
cliffe program. He said, ^Would 
you rather come back to Chi- 
cago, intern at the magazine and 
work with the editors and writers 
there?” Ithought, Yeah, I probably 
would learn much more by being 
with some of the best writers and 
editors around. 
PLAYBOY: Did you feel coerced? 
HEFNER: I never felt pressured to work in the 
company or, later, to take over the company. 
Ive met enough Donald Grahams, Arthur 
Sulzberger Jrs. and Brian L. Robertses, and I 
think it must be challenging to feel this man- 
tle on you almost from the beginning or to feel 
ifyou choose not to accept it you're deeply dis- 
appointing someone you love. When I went to 
work at the company I'm quite sure my dad did 
notexpect me to stay, never mind run it some- 
day. Things that would have been burdensome, 
like feeling my life had been mapped out for me 
orthatIdidn'thave free choice, were not there. 
PLAYBOY: How did you adapt to the office 
environment? 
HEFNER: In no small measure as a result 
of its being Playboy, youre talking about 


Y 


т 


people who are crackerjack smart, highly сге- 
ative and overwhelmingly liberal. I felt com- 
pletely at home with them. Problem-solving 
is my default mode, and it manifests itself in 
all aspects of my life. I came to realize that 
business is this interesting mix of creativity 
and discipline, and discipline is sort of about 
problem-solving. For me, Playboy lived at 
this interesting intersection of the two, with 
a strong element of social conscience over it. 
The thing that most struck me after I’d been 
there awhile was how much I enjoyed it and 
how much more comfortable I felt than I ever 
would have imagined. 


PLAYBOY: When your father offered you the 
chance to run the company with him, you had 
to deal with its financial troubles. He reportedly 
said it was as if he’d thrown a great party and 
now you'd come in to clean up the morning after. 
HEFNER: He actually said that to me and then 
repeated it publicly. Well, I thought, there’s a 
little self-awareness anyway. [laughs] For sure 
there was trouble in the empire by the time I 
became president. I often ask myself what 
made me think I was up to the task, because, 
to be honest, there was no logic to it. I was 29. 
I'd never worked anywhere else in a business. I 
didn’t even have an MBA. And it was a publicly 
traded company, so I wasn’t going to be for- 
given for making learner’s mistakes. But peo- 
ple do things that by all rights they shouldn’t be 


50 


able to do, in part because they don’t know that 
they shouldn't be able to do it, and so they just 
press forward. 

PLAYBOY: During your tenure Playboy saw 
drastic layoffs and an expensive push toward 
developing a strong online presence long be- 
fore other magazines had made the leap. How 
much guidance and support did your father 
offer when things got rocky? 

HEFNER: I was incredibly stressed about 
the state of the company and the responsi- 
bility, and I spent a long time worrying about 
whether we could turn it around. I had all these 
stakeholders—the employees, the public share- 
holders, the business partners. 
But I also had him. He did say at 
one point, ^I want you to know I 
sleep better knowing that you're 
in this job," which I thought was 
very dear. 

PLAYBOY: Was your father a good 
businessman? 

HEFNER: If he wanted to be, he 
could be. He had an acute intel- 
ligence that allowed him to very 
quickly zero in on what was im- 
portant in complex situations. 
He'd ask the questions that, de- 
pending on whether you were 
prepared or not, you were either 
glad to be talking about or really 
sorry he'd asked. For someone as 
creative as he was, he could also 
be highly analytical and logical. 
On the other hand, he could will- 
fully not be a good businessman 
if he decided something else was 
more important to him. He could 
chooseto disregard what I'm sure 
he knew were the merits of the 
business side. When people on 
my team would get discouraged, I 
used to say, “It’s a campaign, not 
a battle." Over time he became 
less and less an active business 
partner. He didn't aspire to bea 
CEO; he aspired to be an editor 
and a chief creative officer. He had become 
a CEO because he'd started a magazine that 
then spawned an empire, and he was the per- 
sontorun it. 

PLAYBOY: So you didn't take offense when 
your father said things like “Ask Corporate," 
referring to you? 

HEFNER: [Laughs] Or “Ask Chicago." No. The 
flip side of that was when something didn’t go 
the way a person wanted, the first sentence 
they would say to me always began with “Your 
father....” It’s like when a parent comes home 
from work and the other parent says, “Your 
son....” You know the end of that sentence isn’t 
“...got an A on his math test today." 

PLAYBOY: Working with any boss is compli- 
cated enough, let alone, one would imagine, 


working with a boss who is also your parent. 
How heated did things get? 

HEFNER: I can tell you that it never got 
heated between my father and me because 
he was completely nonconfrontational. He 
was not a screamer or a table pounder. If we 
were having a difficult time, it would mani- 
fest itselfin tension during a meeting or in the 
avoidance of meetings. 

PLAYBOY: How did you weather the charges of 
nepotism and the magazine articles that called 
you the Princess of Playboy and Ms. Playboy, as 
if you got the job only as a matter of succession? 
HEFNER: I'd been president a few years and 
we were in the middle of the turnaround when 
I just decided that most people were going to 
judge me based on what I did with the opportu- 
nity Гд been given. That's all I ever asked for. 
The fact that some people would never get past 
the fact that I'd been given this op- 
portunity as a function of being the 
daughter of the founder—or, for that 
matter, the son of the founder—just 
didn’t matter to me. 

PLAYBOY: When you ran the com- 
pany, women executives were a minor- 
ity. How many other women were in 
top positions within Playboy’s ranks? 
HEFNER: On the Playboy Club 
side, a woman vice president in 
charge of a lot of the marketing 
and merchandising sent me a cute 
welcome-to-the-club note when I be- 
came a vice president. Over time, 
women in number-two positions had 
come up the ranks in administra- 
tive services and human resources. 
Many senior editors, the copy chief, 
the West Coast photo editor, the car- 
toon editor and, for much of the time 
I was there, the fiction editors were 
women, and we had big copy and re- 
search staffs, many of them women. When 
I joined, in the mid-1970s, women at Time, 
Newsweek and I think even The New York Times 
were filing class-action suits because women 
couldn’t get out of the copy pool; there were no 
women on mastheads. At Playboy there wasn’t 
the dynamic that all the women were secre- 
taries and all the men had power. It was much 
more nuanced than that. When I left, more 
than 40 percent of my executives were women. 
PLAYBOY: How do you explain some people’s 
insistence on believing that Playboy must 
have been, and may still be, a sexist, Mad 
Men-type environment? 

HEFNER: I encountered a fair amount of sex- 
ism, but it wasn’t within the walls of the com- 
pany. When I was running Playboy, it was almost 
laughable how often an accounting firm, law 
firm or investment bank would come to bid on 
work, and you just knew from the dynamic of the 
team they brought that the senior partner had 
said, “We can’t go in there with no women! Find 


Y 


a woman, for God's sake!" And so they'd picked 
some poor woman whose name they didn't even 
know who’d be cowering against the wall in the 
conference room. It was ridiculous. 
PLAYBOY: What kind of sexual harassment 
have you encountered in your life and career? 
HEFNER: I don’t know any women who haven't 
been sexually harassed, to be honest. Sexual 
harassment is a power issue by definition, 
so once I became president and CEO I wasn’t 
likely to be targeted. But was I in situations 
where men seemed to think I was dying to kiss 
them and have them put their tongues down 
my throat when I had no interest? Or they put 
me up against a wall? Or came pounding on 
my door in a hotel room? Absolutely. So in the 
broader sense of a lack of clear communica- 
tion and understanding the difference between 
someone expressing interest and someone who 


Its not an 
accident that 


the places where 
women’s rights 
are suppressed 


are the places 


sex is repressed. 


is not interested, I have seen that, yes. 
PLAYBOY: How do you react to the charge 
that Playboy contributed to and continues to 
contribute to the culture of harassment and 
toxic masculinity? 

HEFNER: It's a complete misapprehension of 
anything to do with Playboy. In all the years 
I worked there we never had that problem, to 
my knowledge. We never had to litigate a suit. 
And it was a highly sexualized environment by 
definition because of the creative content of 
the product. It was very clear that the culture 
was one of respect—respect on every level. 
We weren't going to subject employees to drug 
tests or polygraphs, and the models were as re- 
spected as the writers or any of the magazine's 
other contributors. All of the Playboy Clubs had 
Bunny mothers so the women working as Bun- 
nies would have a woman, not a man, to go to if 
there was a problem. 

PLAYBOY: And what about the photos and lay- 
outs in the magazine? 


ol 


HEFNER: You have to treat those photos as 
a Rorschach test: You’re reading your own 
psyche into them to think that the magazine 
in any way stood for anything other than re- 
spectful relationships between men and 
women. It couldn’t have been more overt in 
the voice of the magazine or in the people who 
were interviewed for it. I remember reading 
an answer to a question in Playboy Advisor 
in the early 1980s that was so stunning: “She 
has the right to say no even if she has her 
panties off.” 

PLAYBOY: Then how do you feel about the 
famous phrase “You can’t be a feminist at 
Playboy” being leveled at you—both then and 
in hindsight? 

HEFNER: Well, in no particular order, I 
would have said Iam among many feminists 
at Playboy, and I know from the research we 
do that the readers of the magazine 
also support the goals of the wom- 
en’s movement and don’t see the 
idea of the sexual appeal of women 
and beauty in any way at odds with 
that. I think it’s not an accident 
that the places in the world where 
women’s rights are suppressed are 
also the places in the world where 
sex is repressed. 

Playboy has been a force for good 
in terms of opening up attitudes and 
empowering people. And the sex- 
ual revolution benefited women as 
well as men because the good girl- 
bad girl dichotomy was harmful for 
women. Separate from that, are you 
interested in slogans or in chang- 
ing the world? Because if you want 
to change the world, you need allies, 
and if you want to have allies, then 
I wouldn’t push away the largest 
men’s magazine that is actually on 
your side on these issues. It’s not a good strat- 
egy to make young women less likely to identify 
as feminist because they see it as being anti- 
male. It’s а struggle the women’s movement has 
actually gone through, more at certain times 
than others, but it’s still a struggle. For a long 
time you'd get women—forget men—who would 
say, “Well, I’m not a feminist, but...” and then 
they’d say things that are completely feminist. 
Playboy did not cause the word feminist to take 
on ataint that kept younger women from iden- 
tifying with it; it was that aspect of the wom- 
en’s movement at its extreme—Catharine 
MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, “all heterosex- 
ual sex is rape,” “all heterosexual men are fun- 
damentally rapists.” Whether they believe that 
ог not I can’t say, but it’s a warped sense of who 
men are and is not designed to build bridges 
between the genders in a way that could help 
solve issues, whether issues that transcend 
gender or issues like sexual harassment that 
are rooted in gender. 


PLAYBOY: Let’s circle back to your story. In 
January 2009 you exited Playboy Enterprises 
and went on to pursue other interests: politi- 
cal, corporate, public health and beyond. How 
was it for you transitioning out of Playboy? 
HEFNER: I'd actually been thinking about 
leaving for a couple of years. I had to de- 
cide what I wanted to do next, and the only 
thing I knew for certain was that I hada long- 
standing interest in politics and public pol- 
icy. We had just elected Barack Obama, for 
whom I'd been working since his U.S. Senate 
primary run, when very few people thought 
he could win. I sat next to Michelle when 
Barack gave the speech in Denver that put 
him on the map. I invited Barack to be the 
featured elected official at an annual maga- 
zine conference I chaired, and I asked David 
Remnick to interview him. I brought him to 
L.A. for his first fund-raiser and 
asked Norman Lear to host it. 
We had a real history together. I 
thought if I’m ever going to do any- 
thing more than just help individ- 
ual candidates—if not now, when? 
But I didn’t want to move to Wash- 
ington, and I didn’t want to try to 
get ajob in the administration. 
PLAYBOY: Were you anxious 
about finding another position 
quickly? 

HEFNER: My then husband [Wil- 
liam Marovitz], to give him fair 
due, gave me a great piece of ad- 
vice: “Don’t feel you have to say 
yes to everything that’s offered 
to you right away as if there won't 
be other things. If you can wait a 
bit, I think you'll have opportuni- 
ties you can’t imagine, because no 
one’s thought of you as available to 
do anything other than what one 
does in one's spare time when one is CEO ofa 
public company. Now you're available.” 
PLAYBOY: What were you offered? 
HEFNER: I said noto a bunch of not-for-profit 
boards, but the founders and CEO of Canyon 
Ranch, on whose board I sat, called. I didn’t 
want to be CEO but I did get to work with them, 
first as a consultant and then as executive 
chairman of a new division. A CNN producer 
asked if I would like to do more television. I'd 
started doing TV for a while when the Wash- 
ington Speakers Bureau contacted me about 
representing me, and I started doing that. 
Things just assembled themselves in such a 
way that I thought, I can make a living and 
have enough time to do things that interest 
me in the political and not-for-profit world 
and have a life. 

PLAYBOY: More of a life than you had as 
a CEO? 

HEFNER: Once I was out of that for a while, 
I could see more clearly that the job of CEO 
entailed worrying 24/7 about everybody else. 


Y 


It was enormously refreshing to find that I 
still take everything I do seriously and give 
it my all, but I don't have to feel that every- 
thing rests on my decision-making. Dur- 
ing my time at Canyon Ranch, I met with 
HatchBeauty. Three years ago its CEO said, 
"Would you consider working with us to 
help build the company to the next level?" 
I said yes. And a former friend who had a 
consulting firm I used when I was building 
Playboy.com in the 1990s is now an operat- 
ing partner at L Catterton. He has just been 
asked to become CEO of the largest mas- 
sage school and skin care school in the coun- 
try and do a turnaround. He asked if I would 
be interested in working with him on it. I've 
agreed to do that. And I'm on the board of a 
large family agricultural company because 
I met the CEO through the not-for-profit 


Listen, I had a 


personal life 
when I was 


running Playboy, 


so for sure I 


have a personal 


life now. 


WomenCorporateDirectors. I recognize there 
may come a time when everything stops and 
nothing else starts, but it's been more than 
eight years and it's worked so far. 

PLAYBOY: And you have a personal life? 
HEFNER: Oh gosh, yes. The nice thing about 
virtually everything I've just described is 
that I have a high degree of control over how 
much time I spend on it and how I spend that 
time, so it can flex, you know? If something 
becomes intense, then something else goes on 
the back burner for a bit. Listen, I had a per- 
sonal life when I was running Playboy, so for 
sure I have a personal life now. 

PLAYBOY: You mentioned earlier that there is 
aman in your life. Do you want to say anything 
more about him? 

HEFNER: We haven't been going out very 
long, but I would call it a very serious rela- 
tionship. He's in business but has broad in- 
terests and has a fantastic young son in his 
20s who's very interested in politics. That's 
been fun, because some of the candidates 


he works for are candidates I've worked for, 
which is kind of neat. One of the advantages 
of having lived some years is you know more 
quickly whether someone is the kind of per- 
son, in all the things that matter to you, you 
would be serious about. 

PLAYBOY: As someone with a strong interest 
and sphere of influence in politics, are you op- 
timistic about the future of this country? 
HEFNER: I'm a fundamental optimist, so 
I'm optimistic about our politics, the planet, 
human relationships, business. That doesn't 
mean I'm not worried. There's very little 
this administration is doing that I don't ve- 
hemently disagree with. I was actively in- 
volved in an effort to end gerrymandering 
here in Illinois, and I deeply believe in end- 
ingthe corrupting influence of money in pol- 
itics through some form of public financing 
and independent drawing of elec- 
toral maps. I'm increasingly in- 
trigued by this concept you have 
in California of open primaries. 
As depressing as the results of 
the election were—which, by the 
way, was on my birthday, thank 
you very much—I found it equally 
disturbing that more than 90 mil- 
lion people who could have voted 
didn't. But there are things that 
make you optimistic: the thou- 
sands of lawyers who showed up 
at airports the night of the first 
travel ban, the multimillion-dollar 
spike in contributions to the ACLU 
and Planned Parenthood and the 
numbers of wonderful people in 
elected office, such as Senator Amy 
Klobuchar from Minnesota. 
PLAYBOY: Do you see any strong 
presidential candidates for 2020? 
HEFNER: No, and I'm not par- 
ticularly worried about that. At this point in 
time people didn't know Barack, Bill Clinton 
or Jimmy Carter either. 

PLAYBOY: Accusations of sexual misconduct 
against director and producer Brett Ratner re- 
cently derailed a Hugh Hefner biopic project 
in which Jared Leto had been rumored as a 
possibility to star. Do you want to see a movie 
made of your father's life? 

HEFNER: Jared Leto has the bone struc- 
ture for it. I’m very impressed with him as an 
actor. I'm mostly rooting for a good script. The 
Amazon series American Playboy was so good, 
though, I'd kind of like it to be the last chapter. 
PLAYBOY: Looking back on it all, have you 
ever wished you'd been born to someone else? 
HEFNER: No. First of all, it’s the life you 
know. I’m not much of a “road not taken” per- 
son. I’m still encouraged to run for office, and 
it’s one of the things I probably would have 
done if I hadn’t gone down the path that I did. 
But I didn’t feel burdened by it. It’s been a 
wonderful life. и 


CELEBRATE THE MAN 
BEHIND 44 ALL 


mer | 


SPECIAL TRIBUTE EDITION | 


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VISIT PLAYBOY.COM/HMH FOR YOUR LIMITED-EDITION 
SPECIAL TRIBUTE TO HUGH M. HEFNER 


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Per WZ 


- 


For its spring 2017 
collection, fashion 
brand Eckhaus Latta 
launched the year’s 
sexiest ad campaign. 


“vr 


d protest, privacy and pregnancy—a look at 20175 craggy sexual landscape 


sy LIZ SUMAN & SAMANTHA SAIYAVONGSA 


PUSSY 
POWER 


ATTACK OF THE 
26-FOOT WOMAN 

Our Evolution (right), a 
towering digital portrait 
of anude woman created 
by artists Mia Hardwick 
and Marty Kenney, ar- 
rived in November at the 
National Mall, where it 
stood as a statement of 
female empowerment 

at Catharsis on the Mall, 
a three-day free-speech 
version of Burning Man. 


UNCAGED 
Three days before the Women’s March, artist and 
activist Natalie White (above), who’s no stranger 


to bringing exposure to a cause, staged a topless 
demonstration called Women’s Equality Jail in 
support of the Equal Rights Amendment. 


HAT TIP 

The day after Donald Trump's inauguration, a sea of 
pink cat ears flooded the nation’s capital for the Wom- 
en's March. “Pussyhats” became the unofficial uni- 
form of the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. 


PLEASURE CRAFT 
Japanese artist 
Megumi Igarashi spent 
a week in jail оп ob- 
scenity charges for 
e-mailing 3-D scans 

of her vulva that 

she’d used to build 

her vagina-kayak. 

In October Igarashi, 
who works under the 
name Rokudenashiko 
(loosely translated: 
“good-for-nothing girl”) 
joined forces with PEN 
America on an initiative 
to protect artists from 
censorship and govern- 
ment persecution. 


RECKONING 


DOWNFALL 

Hollywood 

megapro- 

ducer Harvey 

Weinstein was 

dumped from 

his own com- 

pany after doz- 

ens of women 

accused him of 

unwanted advances and worse. The rev- 
elations of one man’s misconduct rapidly 
snowballed into a national conversation 
about sex and power—and harassment 
allegations against many other well- 
known men. 


VOICES RISING 

The #MeToo hashtag exploded in 
response to the Weinstein charges, with 
more than 500,000 people tweeting their 
stories of harassment and abuse. 


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PRIVACY, PLEASE 


т 


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IT'S IN YOUR HANDS 
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SOMEONE’S GOING DOWN 
Rapper Cardi B’s eye-catching 
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The distinctive 


In July a federal judge approved 


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SOMETIMES 
CHEATERS WIN 


Users of Ashley 
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66 


targeted celebs, 
including Kristen 
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Stella Maxwell, 
fought back with 
legal action. 


т 


HOT 
MAMAS 


OH, BEY-BEY 

Wearing a braand panties 

and little else, Beyoncé (right) 
made the sexiest pregnancy 
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Exactly 26 years after Annie 
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the cover of Vanity Fair, Serena 
Williams appeared on a similar 
belly-baring cover (below), 
also captured by Leibovitz. 
Another beautiful reminder that 
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A FREE WOMAN 
Before exiting of- 
fice, Barack Obama 
commuted Chelsea 
Manning’s sentence 
for leaking military 
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ebrated by releas- 
ing the first photo of 
herself as a woman. 
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In July President 
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NITY BEAUTY 

In November model 
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Five terms that 
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a hookup for which 
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Playmate ofthe Year 2017 Brook Power's 
dreamy Mansion shoot went down just 
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wearing a hat at all 
times to hide a bald 

spot, bad hair or other 

perceived flaw. 


67 


SHEER GENIUS 

Marc Jacobs ended his New York Fashion Week 
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As part of his fall collection, Calvin Klein dressed 
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TEEING OFF 

Braless models took to the runway wearing 
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study found. 


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The award for most sexually active 
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a year. A Kinsey Institute study that 
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person has sex. 


DEAD SEXY? 
The “plastinated” human bodies 
that populate Gunther von Hagens’s 
Body Worlds: Pulse exhibit, at the 


California Science Center through 
February, include a copulating 
cadaver couple (reverse cowgirl, 
we've heard). 


68 


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Yes, it’s kind of like a gas mask—but a sexy gas 
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HAPPY ANNIVERSARY 


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porn powerhouse followed the 
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birthday after a rebranding 
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that correspond to the visuals. 


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Gwyneth Paltrow found herself 
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products Goop hypes: a $15,000 
gold-plated vibrator (right). 


69 


SHE 


Silence entombs the secrets of the past 


sy ARIEL DORFMAN 


FICTION 


She didn’t know I was watching when they roughed her up that dawn. 

Oh, she knew Iwas a conscript, wasting away my youth in that regimiento, 
everything in my life terrible except for our one tumultuous night together 
on a weekend furlough. Carmina had liked me in spite of the uniform I was 
wearing, hoped I would do the right thing, she said, and stay loyal to the 
government if there was a coup, and I had answered that I prayed to the 
Virgin every chance I got that I wouldn't have to make that sort of choice, 
promising that the next time we'd meet up I wouldn't be in military garb. 


But the next time turned out to be five days 
later when my mates pushed her through the 
door of the barracks and she didn’t recognize 
me. Or didn’t want to. 

She wasn’t blindfolded. 

Later, we blindfolded everybody, right away. 
The sergeant told us it was for our own good, 
so the prisoners couldn't ever testify as to our 
identity, but that wasn’t the reason we covered 
those eyes up, I thought. I thought it was be- 
cause we were ashamed of what we were doing, 
we didn’t want to remember what those eyes 
were mirroring. 

But that dawn in Puente Alto her eyes were 
wide open, looking groundward but oh so 
open, and yet she did not see me. Maybe every- 
thing happened too fast, maybe my image was 
distorted by her fear: a man across the room 
from her, in full military gear, the mere blur 
of a face, cheekbones smeared over with black 
grease. And a rifle with a bayonet pointed in 
her direction. If I had been her I would have 
focused on the glint of that bayonet, the raw 
steel, the possible thrust of that raw white 
steel. But I wasn’t her. I was standing at a dis- 
tance and remained there all the while—the 
slaps and kicks could not have lasted more 
than a minute or so—and then she was gone, 
hustled away to who knows what hole in hell. 
Without my having touched her. The hands 
that had explored every soft slope of her skin 
did not fondle her in that barracks, those 
hands were not mine, not my lips swearing at 
her, not my feet probing her midriff. 

If it had gone any further, I would have in- 
tervened, of that I am sure. Or that is what I 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDEL RODRIGUEZ 


told myself then, continued to tell myself for 
the next four months until I saw her again, 
have repeated the same litany during the de- 
cades she and I have spent together. This I do 
not doubt: I would have stopped my mates if 
they had gone too far. But I was spared the 
need to confront them. No, no, she was the 
one spared. At least that dawn, in that place. 
Later, once she was out of my sight, I don’t 
know, I can’t know, I wasn’t there. But then, 
that first hour after she was arrested, that 
first minute, something saved her. Some- 
thing. Not me. That same, inexplicable some- 
thing would bless other female prisoners over 
the following months, once in a while one of 
them would remind us of a sister or a mother 
or who knows what pinup goddess we adored, 
and just like that, we held back—but with her, 
with Carmina, my brothers in arms experi- 
enced that need for mercy for the first time, 
foretelling other moments of absolution that 
awaited them, all of us, in the future. 

Because suddenly the hands and the boots 
and the foul words ceased, the urge to un- 
buckle belts and open zippers subsided, they 
all took a step back, affording her a miracu- 
lous circle in which to breathe, realize that she 
was going to survive. 

Or maybe she already knew that. She was 
smart, my Carmina. As soon as she came into 
the room, before the first blow, she had al- 
ready decided to keep her eyes averted—not 
only refusing to look at where I was stand- 
ing, staring quietly, across the chasm of that 
vast space, but avoiding as well every soldier’s 
hungry face and lips. She had been preparing 


for just such an encounter, more than we had. 
Like all supporters of the revolutionary gov- 
ernment, she had trained herself as the dev- 
astation of a military takeover loomed near, 
been instructed by comrades on how to sur- 
vive, never make your captors feel bad about 
what they are doing, that will only urge them 
on to do something worse, do not provoke them 
into doing something worse. 

All speculation on my part. 

Thad then and still have now, 35 years later, 
all that time with her by my side, no way of 
knowing what went on in her head. Only if I 
had whispered to her when we first met again, 
revealed that I had been there and witnessed 
every blow, every curse, the miracle of a re- 
prieve. Only if she had asked me directly or 
not even asked, just simply stated, I saw you 
there, I’m glad you did nothing, I’m glad that 
you did not endanger your life trying to save 
me when I was perfectly able to take care of 
myself. We both had to protect our future to- 
gether, not let it get contaminated. What she 
never admitted. What I wanted to admit, it 
was the first thing I needed to do, come clean, 
when I knocked on the door of her father’s 
house and she appeared, worse for the wear— 
a broken rib, bruised breasts, a scar on her 
inner thigh, a fractured wrist, nothing com- 
pared with what happened to others—but alive 
and with a smile that did not try to hide the 
tooth that had been knocked out. 

T had called her house every day since her ar- 
rest. Always getting the same measured an- 
swer from her mother: Carmina was doing well, 
thank you very much. Yes, she would be back 


71 


soon, again thanks for your interest, we will be 
sure to let her know you were this considerate. 

I wasn’t going to appear at her doorstep in 
uniform. Not when her father, the whole fam- 
ily, hated the military for overthrowing the 
president, hated them even more for what they 
did to the president’s followers afterward, 
confirmed that hatred forever when the patrol 
battered down their door just before dawn and 
carted Carmina away. And never conceded, 
the authorities, that she had been detained, 
her parents and her little sister had no way of 
knowing if she was alive or dead until that af- 
ternoon, four months later, when she suddenly 
limped her way home. 

I saw it as an auspicious sign, some slight be- 
nevolence from heaven, that it was the same 
day that my military service ended. Both of us 
released at the same time. 

So, yes, I fully intended to tell her what 
I had seen, what I had been unable to stop, 
what I would have stopped no matter the risk 
if things had gotten out of hand, presenting 
myself in the best possible light and yet not 
shirking my guilt, my dread, my anger, my 
disgust. That was my plan, as God is my wit- 
ness. But only God is my witness— God and the 
band of brothers with whom I served—because 
she did not let me say a word, her smile was 
like a sweet wall, she was so radiantly happy 
to be breathing the same air as I was, and to 
see me, me and not my bayonet, me and not 
my helmet, me and not my camouflaged out- 
fit, radiantly happy that I was also alive, that 
Ihad not been devoured by the same terror she 
had been through. 

All these months I never forgot your face, 
she said, her only acknowledgment that any- 
thing special or terrifying had befallen her— 
thank you, thank you for thinking of me every 
day, I know you were praying for me every day, 
I could feel it every day—and this was true, I 
had not forgotten her, not for one instant, our 
one night fighting loneliness, starving death, 
those soft, feverish hours under the blanket 
her friend had loaned her so the winter moon 
that streamed through the window into that 
back room would hide her body from my eyes 
that wanted to roam over each last inch of 
what I hoped would be mine forever. She did 
not need me to shatter the one illusion that 
had kept her sane and unbroken over those 
months of prison in a place that she did not 
mention and I did not ask about. 

I'll confess tomorrow, now’s not the right 
time. Except tomorrow wasn't the right time, 
nor the day after that one, tomorrow kept giv- 
ing way to more tomorrows and once we be- 
came engaged, once she recovered enough to 


WE WERE WISE 
ENOUGH NOT TO 
LET OURSELVES BE 
EATEN UP BY THE 
CATASTROPHE. 


repeat and explore with me what that inau- 
gural night had offered, once whatever was 
shattered in the bones and bruised on her skin 
started to heal, when her many muscles were 
ready to play and love again, once her body 
had forgotten her ordeal enough to enjoy my 
body over and over again, well, it was too late. 
Icouldn't ruin it for her, for us. 

If she had cracked open the door to the past 
just a sliver, offered the slightest splinter of 
permission for me to breach the stillness. But 
I had to respect her decision to keep the cob- 
web of her memories in the dark. At least that’s 
what I convinced myself of, that's how I jus- 
tified the days as they rushed by toward that 
wonderful morning when we married, when I 
was no longer wed to the army, no longer felt 
under orders, distancing myself ever further 
from those other soldiers who had pounded 
my Carmina and also spared her, those mates 
whose loyalty was all that had separated me 
from death if it came calling. 

The balm of silence. For both of us. 

Later, I would wonder whether it wasn't for 
the sake of the children we had yet to con- 
ceive but were awaiting us at the other end 
of the tunnel of our life and who would have 
vanished into nothingness, not been given a 
chance even to exist if she had known what I 
had seen, if she had not covered up what she 
had endured, I wondered if it wasn’t for them 


that she turned her back on that dawn and 
the nights and days and dawns that followed, 
eluding the memory ofthe experience for the 
sake of our two sons and our darling daughter 
just as she had avoided my startled, confused, 
scared eyes as soon as she was marched into 
that room. 

Better that way. 

Or were we expected to throw our lives away 
like fucking crabs dragged by the tide into the 
sea, for her to throw me into the garbage, for 
me to throw her into despair, throw away our 
one stab at happiness, was it fair to demand 
that we grind out our existence remote from 
each other forever and ever because I had 
been unlucky to get conscripted six months 
before the military coup, she had been un- 
lucky to have a malicious neighbor who ac- 
cused Carmina of revolutionary activities as 
a way of getting back at her parents for put- 
ting up a fence that choked off the sunlight 
from his squalid next-door window? Was it 
our fault that we had been born in this coun- 
try at the asshole end of the earth? 

But we were wise enough, just like the coun- 
try, just like the country that kept waiting for 
democracy and elections to return, she and I 
and everybody else, we were wise enough not 
to let ourselves be eaten up by the catastrophe. 

If I were haunted, it would have been dif- 
ferent, Га have been forced to tell her, tell 


72 


anybody, relieve myself. Like a bladder about 
to burst. But Iam not haunted. No ghosts, no 
nightmares. Not even of their faces, those 
boys as they blinked into the muzzles of the 
firing squad. True, there was no certainty 
my bullet had been the one to kill either of 
them, I had aimed to one side with the first 
one, a bit above his head at the second boy. It 
was risky, if the sergeant, let alone the lieu- 
tenant, had suspected, if all of us had done 
the same thing and everyone had missed 
and the boys left standing, intact, alive de- 
spite the hail of ammunition, pissing in their 
pants but alive, I would have been the one to 
die next. But the first one collapsed like a 
heap of clothes, the second one tottered for 
an instant that seemed everlasting, enough 
for a look of surprise to cross his blackening 
eyes—and they were dead and I was not, I sur- 
vived and have been able to forget almost ev- 
erything about them. I tried not to hurt them, 
that’s the truth, and they have thanked me 
by not smuggling their voices into my dreams 
during the nights when Iam most vulnerable 
and cannot defend myself against any fad- 
ing memory. But neither do they hound my 
waking hours. Leaving me alone, those two 
boys, just like the others, everybody else who 
crawled through my life while I was complet- 
ing my military service. Except for her. That 
Irecall, I cannot help recalling how she stum- 
bled into the room, her eyes to the floor where 
she was so soon to drop to her knees. Her eyes 
wide open as she fell. 

Does revisiting that incident, does that at 
least disturb me? Not really. It is like watch- 
ing a film starring somebody else who has the 
face I used to wear, the face and body she was 
inhabiting at the time, not me, certainly not 
her. Suspended far away, as if that past be- 
longed to a stranger, to a man who died that 
day and will not resurrect. 

Until this morning, when everything 

changed. 
There was that insistent knock at the door. 
Because our doorbell wasn’t working and I 
kept postponing the need to fix it, ГП get to 
that tomorrow, mi amor, that’s what I had 
said just yesterday to Carmina when she 
scolded me for being a lazybones. 

Today was tomorrow and there was that 
knock. 

I opened the door. 

A woman was there. Older than her years, 
tangled hair that straggled this way and that 
and a bitter mouth twisted into what she prob- 
ably thought was a smile, and eyes, those eyes 
that were the only thing on fire inside her, 


eyes that see through you because they have 
seen everything under the sun and beyond, 
eyes that once knew how to glow in the dark. 

She wanted to see Carmina. 

“You know her?” 

“T was with her back then.” 

“Back then?” 

“Back then, you know what I mean, you’re 
her husband, aren’t you? Back then. Four 
months together, back then.” 


I let her in. 

She explained that Carmina was not answer- 
ing her calls, had hung up on her the last two 
times but that she was going to see her no mat- 
ter what, come hell and high water. Hell and 
high water, her exact words. 

I told her Carmina was out shopping, did 
not elaborate that we ran a business from our 
home, sandwiches for a stand down at the 
Mapocho bus terminal, just cheese or just 


73 


| SURVIVED AND HAVE 
BEEN ABLE 10 FORGET 
ALMOST EVERYTHING. 


ham or ham and cheese, three kinds of sand- 
wiches, and that afternoon we needed some 
more bread for the next day’s delivery. 

“Т can wait." 

I offered her a cup of tea, some biscuits. 

She didn't even respond with a thank you, 
muttered sullenly that she'd have something 
when Carmina came back. 

Which was an hour later. All the while the 
two of us just sat, she didn't say a word and 
I didn't ask her anything either, that's how 
much we liked each other. 

Nor did Carmina seem to like her. Or didn't 
like the fact that, despite those unanswered 
phone calls, the many times my wife had 
hung up on her, this woman had thrust her- 
self into our lives, crossed the threshold that 
was not hers to cross or enter or question. 

Carmina didn't even greet her with a kiss 
orahugorasmile. 

"I already said no, Cristina. Why are you 
here?” 

Cristina turned to me. “Your wife does not 
want to appear before the commission. I’m 
hoping you will help me convince her.” 

“What commission?” 

Carmina responded in a voice that was 
drained of all emotion. “You know what com- 
mission. The one set up by our new govern- 
ment to register the citizens who suffered 
during the previous regime, give them com- 
pensation if their complaint proves true. The 
Reparations Commission.” 

“Oh, that one.” 

The woman, for some infernal reason, kept 
addressing me instead of Carmina. After 
having ignored my presence for an hour as if 
T had the plague. 

“Гуе told Carmina that what she suffered 
during those four months entitles her to 


that money. Her name wouldn’t even be pub- 
lished, nobody has to know that she testified. 
But it shouldn’t just be about the money. Her 
story, every story, matters. Tell her, tell her 
how important it is that she do this.” 

For one moment that lasted longer, much 
longer, than it had taken that boy to look 
down on the spread of blood reddening his 
shirt, for one eternal moment, I hesitated. 
Then I said, “You tell her,” and I left the room. 

They were in there for a couple of hours. Or 
maybe it was less. Who knows how long it was? 

I stayed in the kitchen, cutting the rinds 
off the bread, making each slice perfectly 
identical to the next one. Preparing the ham 
on one platter, the cheese on the other, mak- 
ing sure every sandwich would be absolutely 
the same as every other one, no customer 
should complain that they were being treated 
unfairly. When I was done, I went to the stove 
and heated up some soup from the previous 
day, and poured half of it into a bowl. 

Left the bowl steaming on my side of the 
table, placed another bowl, unfilled and hol- 
low, in front of Carmina’s chair. Allowed the 
steam to subside, my food to grow cold, my 
spoon unused. Poured the minestrone back 
into the pot. 

Waited. 

I heard the front door opening and closing. 

It took Carmina a while to come into our 
kitchen. As if she had taken a detour, as if 
she had lost her way, as if she needed a map 
to get here. 

She stood at the door, looked at me. 

"I can't do it.” 

I said nothing. 

“I can't do it,” she repeated the words and 
they did not trip on her tongue this time. 
“Lord knows we need the money. We could 


buy acar and double our deliveries.” 

I nodded my head, but the nod did not say 
yes and it did not say no. 

“And Victor could go to business school,” 
Carmina went on. “And Amanda could have 
her braces done. And a vacation, a few days by 
the sea would be nice.” She paused. “But it’s 
not just the money.” 

My mouth was dry. Abruptly, my stomach 
growled. I hadn’t tasted a bite since morning. 

Carmina frowned, ventured farther into 
the kitchen, saw that my bowl was empty, the 
residue of the soup still clinging visibly to the 
inside, my spoon entirely untouched and un- 
troubled next to me on the table. “It’s not just 
the money,” she said again. 

I wanted to say something, anything, but 
nothing came out. 

“Maybe it’s time, Miguel. But I can’t. Not 
toa roomful of strangers." 

Not to a roomful of strangers. She didn’t 
add that first she had to tell me and that was 
the one thing she didn’t know how to do. She 
didn’t need to say it. 

Just waited for me to speak. 

The silence was heavy and would not stop, 
the silence simply would not stop. 

I had to say something. 

“If you could....” I stopped. Then: “If you 
could, what would you tell them?” 

“Everything,” she said. “Everything I saw.” 

“All of it?” 

“All of it.” 

She walked over to the stove, lit the gas. 

“ГП warm this for you again.” 

“For both of us.” 

“Yes, for both of us.” 

“га like that,” I said. 

I watched her stir the pot, I smelled the 
soup we had made just yesterday, together. 

“If you want to do this...,” I said, my voice 
trailing off. Watching her beautiful hand on 
the wooden spoon, her beautiful wide-open 
eyes looking down into the pot. 

“Yes,” she said, not looking at me. 

“Then first,” I said, choosing each word as if 
it had never been said before in the history of 
the world, "first Ihave something to tell you." 

“All of it?” 

“Everything,” I said. “Everything I saw.” 

She tasted the soup with pursed lips, did 
not burn herself, decided the brew was not 
quite ready. 

“First let’s eat,” she said, looking straight at 
me. “Would you like to have some nice warm 
soup first?” 

“Yes,” I said. 

What else was I supposed to say? а 


74 


FOLLOW THE BUNNY 


O O O O O 


/playboy @playboy @playboy playboy + playboy 


г January 
Playmate 
assesses а 
assion for 
edom and 
he face of 
an angel 


ОТОСВАРНУ 
OVE SHORE 


NC 


PLAYMATE 


INIM 3H1 


A delicate tattoo of a feather decorates Kayla 
Garvin’s left forearm. It represents freedom, she 
explains, and it’s a reminder to keep life from 
getting too heavy or pinning her down. Judging 
by Kayla’s nomadic roots and the fluidity with 
which she moves between passions, it’s the per- 
fect emblem for our first Playmate of 2018. 

Born in Eugene, Oregon, a college town she 
describes as “hippie-like,” the middle child 
of three siblings says her family frequently 
relocated. “When I was seven we moved to 
Vegas for a year and then to Colorado,” Kayla 
says. “Everybody asks, ‘Are you from a mil- 
itary family?’ No. My mom is gypsy-like 
and just wants to move around.” As a result, 
Kayla is nothing if not adaptable. “I’m up for 
anything...within reason.” 

That innate flexibility came in handy when 
she shifted the course of her career. “I always 
knew I wanted to be artistic in some way,” she 
says. “In college I majored in psychology with 
a minor in art; I was going to go to grad school 


Mas » 


о сега ma er a петар Qe 1 


Lacking in pre- 

positivity. She’s 

(who's always 

to make everyone 

re everything’s good.” 

5 to men, she's no shrinking 
o be in a good place yourself 
па healthy relationship,” she 


ree spirit can’t be bound by 
iren call of 


I investigated your husband, Mrs. Adams. He isnt cheating on you. 
In fact, Гт your husband. We've just really lost touch recently.” 


"d 


DATA SHEET 


BIRTHPLACE: Eugene, Oregon GURRENT CITY: Los Angeles, California 


CREATE AND CAPTURE 

Гуе been drawing and paint- 
ing ever since | was a little kid. 
And photography has been a 
huge part of my life too. Lately 


l've been concentrating on land- 
scape photography. Because of 
that, | would really like to travel 
to New Zealand. It looks so beau- 
tiful in pictures, and | think | could 
get some amazing photographs 
there. It's at the top of my list. 


LOVE YOURSELF 


Confidence is something that can 
be within a person naturally, but 
it’s also something that can be 
learned. We all struggle with our 
self-image. As I’ve gotten older, 
Руе learned to accept who | am 
and to embrace my inner and 
outer beauty and to just go with 
it. You shouldn't take what others 
say too seriously, and you should 
always be true to yourself. 


HIGH SPIRITS 


My preferred drink when | go out? 
| like tequila. Give me any drink 
with tequila and I’m good. Give 
те a few drinks, and РИ be bust- 
ing out my dance moves! But I'll 
pass on karaoke. 


TAKE IT OUTSIDE 


| hate going to the gym. If I’m 
going to work out, | want to do 
something enjoyable like riding 
my bike or going on a hike. | don't 
have a strict workout regimen. 
| just listen to my body and do 
everything in moderation. 


TIME OUT 


| think my biggest fear is not liv- 
ing my life to the fullest, then 
getting older and looking back 
and thinking, What did | do? | 
want to make sure | don't look 
back with major regrets. Some- 
times you get so caught up inthe 


@kaylajeangarvin 


mundane everyday things, you 
forget to slow down. Life is short. 
You have to relax and enjoy it. 


SWEET GUYS WANTED 


When a guy makes you feel like 
you're special and the only woman 
in the world who matters, it's a big 
turn-on. Just be in the moment, 
sweet, loving and considerate. 


SOCIAL SKILLS 


People get way too absorbed 
in social media instead of en- 
joying what's right in front of 
them. Sometimes | think they 
visit places just to post photos 
of themselves there. lIl be in 
these beautiful environments 
and see everybody with their cell 
phones out, taking selfies! It's 
like they're not even experienc- 
ing it. Sure, take a picture, but 
more important, take in what's 
in front of your face. 


PLAYBOY”S PARTY JOKES 


Studies show that 10 percent of men 
will forget to buy a gift for their signif- 
icant others on Valentine’s Day. Coinci- 
dentally, on that same day, 10 percent of 
women will forget how to give a blow job 
without teeth. 


An agent called one of his clients to tell 
her he had an audition lined up for her. 

“Does the role require nudity?” the 
actress asked. 

The agent said no. 

“Well,” said the actress, “does it per- 
mit nudity?” 


Once you've seen a woman remove her 
bra without taking her shirt off, you'll 
understand why they should be in charge 
ofthings. 


Heard of the hot new sex position? It's 
called 96, and it's a play on 69, except 
you lie head-to-toe facing away from 
each other and silently stare at the walls 


because one of you watched Game of 


Thrones without the other. 


A woman gave her puppy his first shot 
and quickly learned that the little guy 
hates Fireball. 


Ladies, if you want to get an idea of how 
well a prospective boyfriend will treat 
you, take along hard look at how he treats 
his wife. 


A juggler, a magician and a mime walk 
into a bar—and all the women walk out. 


You know how psychologists have iden- 
tified the stages of grief as disbelief, de- 
nial, negotiation and acceptance? They 
should make one of those stages “sponta- 
neously getting rock-hard abs”—because, 
come on, you've been through a lot. 


It has been demonstrated that women 
with graduate degrees are 30 percent 
more likely to engage in anal sex than 
women who have completed only bache- 
lor’s degrees. Ве that as it may, this isn’t a 
good excuse for hanging out at the library. 


An apple a day keeps the doctor away...if 
you throw it hard enough. 


A husband and wife make a bet on Super 
Bowl Sunday. The husband says, “If my 
team wins, you have to go down on me 
every night for an entire month.” 

The wife replies, “If my team wins, you 
have to go down on me every night for an 
entire month.” 

“Regardless of who wins,” says the 
wife’s father, “I get to live the rest of my 
life having heard that.” 


Another scientific study shows that only 
57 percent of women orgasm while hav- 
ing sex—but scientists who are married 
to unsatisfied wives swear that number 


is much lower. 


Look out for some new signage at airport 
arrivals. Next to COURTESY SHUTTLE, 
EVERY 10 MINUTES, the new ones say, 
RUDENESS SHUTTLE, WHENEVER IT GOD- 
DAMN FEELS LIKE IT. 


I was conceived on the carpet in my older 
sister’s bedroom, which is something she 
still holds over me. I really wish she'd get 
rid of that carpet. 


When someone says there’s no such thing 
as a stupid question it’s usually because 
someone just asked a stupid question. 


Our new neighbors are urban chicken 
farmers,” says your girlfriend as she 
calmly checks Zillow to see what kind of 
price you can get for your house. 


Nurse: Where can I find some scrubs? 
TARGET EMPLOYEE: I don’t know—I guess 
hanging out the passenger side of his best 
friend’s ride, trying to holler at me. 


Ever get that feeling, on a weekday morn- 
ing about 15 minutes into your commute, 
that your girlfriend is still talking to you 
through the bathroom door? 


The hacker who stole my Equifax infor- 
mation just sent me $20 with a note say- 
ing, “Hope this helps. Hang in there.” 


Two old friends were sitting on their 
favorite park bench on a Sunday after- 
noon, mulling over their sex lives. 

“My wife gives me blow jobs like she 
cooks my steak,” said the first. 

“Well done?” asked his friend. 

“No, rare.” 

“You think that’s bad, last night my wife 
and I tried anal,” said the friend. 

“How was it! 

“Tt’s not all it’s cracked up to be.” 


20Q 


LILLIAN 
MURPHY 


Deranged hijacker, Batman villain, apocalypse survivor— 
if that’s how you think of this striking Irish actor, 
he politely asks that you take another look 


sy DEVON MALONEY puorocraruy sy PAUL WETHERELL 


Q1: You're known for avoiding the Hollywood 
spotlight in favor of the peace and quiet of your 
home in Dublin. Was that attitude instilled in you, 
or did you just not like the way celebrity felt when 
you first experienced it? 

MURPHY: The concept of Hollywood has al- 
ways been strange to me. I've never lived in Los 
Angeles. It's always been, you go to work, and 
then you come home, and home life is just this 
normality. And when I'm not working I have 
very little to do with “the industry." They're 
two separate entities for me. It's always been 
that way. 

Q2: You went to law school before you got into 
acting. What inspired that choice, and what 
drove you away? 

MURPHY: I'm the eldest of four kids, and we 
come from along line of pedagogues, sothe ac- 
ademic route was strongly encouraged. At the 
time, I thought it could be interesting. There 
were hardly any lectures, so you could go away 
and do a lot of work by yourself. But I realized 
very quickly that it's not a creative world at all. 
Law is all about precedent, so you're always 


looking backward, regurgitating cases. It was 
justthe wrong choice for me, but making a mis- 
step like that can actually be more revelatory 
than anything, because you very quickly real- 
ize what you don't like. 

Q3: Is it true that as a teenager you played in 
a Frank Zappa-inspired band, the Sons of Mr. 
Green Genes? 

MURPHY: Yeah. My brothers and I really liked 
him. We saw some concert he did on the BBC 
late at night; we had never heard of him be- 
fore. The process of discovery was very slow in 
the pre-internet days, but you felt as though 
you were unearthing gold when you discov- 
ered those records. So yeah, he appealed to 
us in many ways: his sense of humor, how 
cynical he was about everything. Compared 
with hardcore aficionados I'm probably very 
fair-weather. He made something like 150 
albums, and some of them I find unnecessar- 
ily dense, but there are 10 or 12 that, at that 
time, blew our minds. 

04: Do you still get together with your broth- 
ers and jam? 


ЕР 
2. 
o 


MURPHY: No one really has time for that, 
but at weddings or family gatherings or boys’ 
weekends, the instruments come out. There 
will always be some drunken jams. 

Q5: Your show Peaky Blinders is returning to 
Netflix, and several more big-name musicians 
have done covers of the theme song, “Red Right 
Hand,” including Iggy Pop and Laura Marling. If 
you could pick any artist, living or dead, to cover 
the song, who would it be? 

MURPHY: I'm a huge music nerd, so it still 
really tickles me that somewhere in the 
world these musicians have actually had to 
sit down and watch the show. It's humbling. 
But it would be pretty extraordinary to hear 
Jeff Buckley do a version of the song. No one 
has had a voice like his since or before, so that 
would be kind of magical. 

Q6: You sort of backed into screen acting 
through music and theater, right? 

MURPHY: Yeah. It was initially music and then 
theater, and then I slowly got into film, then 
television. Theater is still very important for 
me. It was never my burning ambition to be on 
the silver screen. It was a desire to perform— 
that was clear to me from a very young age. The 
medium was secondary. 

Q7: Was there a moment in your performing 
career when you decided to commit to film and 
television acting? 

MURPHY: No; it came gradually. Га been 
doing theater for about four or five years, 
touring plays around Ireland. Then I got an 
agent who said, “Look, there’s this part in a 
short film. Do you want to audition for it?” So 
you go, “Well, that sounds interesting.” You 
get a part in a short film, then a few months 
later it's this tiny part in a feature film, and 
do you want to audition for that? So you audi- 
tion for that, and you get it. And then they say, 
“There's a slightly bigger part....” 

Q8: But you could just as easily have said no 
to each of those opportunities. You had to at 
least have had some curiosity to try out those 
things, right? 

MURPHY: Yes, exactly. And that word is really 
important: curiosity. I think that has been 
my main drive—like, “Wow, wouldn’t theater 


be interesting to try?” Then that led to the 
next thing. 

Q9: You've declined to be part of the Peaky 
Blinders musical currently in development. Do 
you draw the line at musical theater? 

MURPHY: I actually think the musical is such 
a bizarre idea, it could work. [Peaky Blinders 
creator] Steve Knight is an incredibly inven- 
tive man as a writer and as an entrepreneur 
and original thinker. But for various reasons, 
it wouldn’t work for me. I have a limited range 
as a singer, and professional musical-theater 
actors? They work. Eight shows a week, sing- 
ing those songs—it’s relentless. I admire them 
tremendously, but I could never do that. 

Q10: Isn't filming a season of Peaky Blinders 
pretty full-on? 

MURPHY: Yeah. It’s a four-month shoot, and 
it takes about five or six weeks to limber up 
into the character. So it’s about a five-month 
commitment, then there’s generally about 18 
months in between each series, because Steve 
has to go write it, and then it’s a logistical 
nightmare getting everybody back together. 
О11: You say it takes time to settle into your 
character, the Birmingham gang leader Tommy 
Shelby. What does that involve for you? 
MURPHY: You can’t be fooled into think- 
ing you can just wake up and step back into 
a character; you really have to work at it. A 
friend of mine likes to call it conditioning. I 
genuinely don’t share anything with Tommy 
Shelby—not one bit of DNA. Every year Steve 
really pushes the character into strange 
places and unfamiliar territory. I have to re- 
adjust my way of thinking, because the way 
Tommy reacts to situations is completely the 
opposite of how I would react. There’s also 
the physicality of him and the way he carries 
himself, his physical energy. I also need to 
spend time refreshing the accent and making 
that feel authentic. He’s a decorated soldier, 
and he commands incredible respect—God, 
I’m sort of intimidated by him. I’m not that, 
you know? But I love going that distance with 
the characters. 

Q12: The show takes several significant leaps in 
time, and in this new season we see that Tommy 


and his family are even going a little gray. Do 
those jumps make playing the role more chal- 
lenging for you? 

MURPHY: Well, that’s the beauty of these long- 
form dramas—you mature with the charac- 
ters. We decided this season to give Tommy 
some glasses, because he’s a middle-aged man 
now. All the violence and physical brutality 
have taken their toll. But I like that you can 
see the characters mature and carry the bur- 
dens of the kind of lives they live, both men- 
tally and physically. 

Q13: What do you think makes a script worth 
taking on? 

MURPHY: I mean, every part is a gamble, 
because film and television are the most col- 
laborative of all art forms—there are so many 
people involved. But for me there are several 
criteria. It has to be good on the page. It has to 
read well, it has to be compelling, and you have 
to want to get to the end of the story in one sit- 
ting. And then it has to represent something 
different, something that you haven’t explored 
before. Then it needs to have a good director at- 
tached. If any one of those things isn’t present, 
you just can never tell. That’s the exciting but 
also occasionally frustrating thing about being 
an actor: You give your best work, and then you 
hand it over, and it’s up to the editor and the 
director and the distribution company and 
the marketing company and everybody else 
to make it. You take a leap of faith every time, 
but as long as you can tick off some of the boxes 
before you engage, then you should be at least 
part of the way there. 

Q14: Was there ever a particular project that 
surprised you in terms of the risk you took and 
what came out of it? 

MURPHY: Oh, gosh, I don't really know. I tend 
to do a part and move on. I don't really think 
about things retrospectively, really. 

Q15: That was the problem with law school, 
right? 

MURPHY: Well, yes. That's also why Tommy 
Shelby is strange: becauseIkeep coming back 
to him. I've never had that experience before, 
except in theater, I suppose, if you do a second 
run of a show or something. You do the part, 


ГМ INTERESTED IN WHAT PRESSURE DOES ТО THE 
HUMAN PSYCHE AND TO THE HUMAN CONDITION. 


K 


ў LA 3 


and then it's on to the next thing. You don't 
really think about the work again, other than 
hopefully learning something from it. 

Q16: You have made your career playing some 
really intense characters—including the terror- 
ist Jackson Rippner in Red Eye and the Dark 
Knight trilogy's Scarecrow—and you don't ap- 
pear to be anything like those characters in real 
life. Is that a balance you maintain, as though 
each of these parts of your life provides a 
catharsis for the other? 

MURPHY: First of all, I would kind of take 


issue with that. I've played two villains in 
my career; one of them happened to be in a 
big franchise. Again, I hate looking back, 
but look at my characters in The Wind That 
Shakes the Barley, Breakfast on Pluto, The 
Party, Broken. I think that shows a wide 
range of characters, some intense, some in- 
troverted and withdrawn. A lot of the char- 
acters I've played onstage are actually quite 
gentle and soft. When I said earlier that I 
look for something challenging or differ- 
ent, I would be contradicting myself if I were 


playing the same types of characters all the 
time. I think that's a problem that happens 
a lot with journalism, trying to reduce a ca- 
reer to “That's that guy.” It only takes a little 
bit of further inspection to see that’s actually 
not the case. 

Having said that, I’m interested in what 
pressure does to completely normal charac- 
ters who have normal lives, and in what pres- 
sure does to the human psyche and to the 
human condition. 

Q17: What would be in store for you next, 
if you could pick? Do you have any bucket- 
list projects? 

MURPHY: I don’t, really. I’ve enjoyed the ex- 
perience of long-form television, and even- 
tually Peaky Blinders will come to an end. I 
like the idea of finding some other television 
project that could offer me a different chal- 
lenge. I’m also going back to theater this year 
to do a play with my longtime collaborator, the 
playwright Enda Walsh. But I don’t think any 
actor would be able to answer that question. 
It’s so unpredictable, and the vagaries of get- 
ting a film financed are so complicated—a 
film can be just about to happen and then col- 
lapse in front of you, or you can suddenly get 
offered a part you’ve never heard of and the 
film’s ready to go. My whole career has been 
completely haphazard, you know? 

Q18: Does that mean actors have to be built for 
that unpredictability? 

MURPHY: Yeah, I think all actors need to 
be inclined that way. You have to get used to 
things not working out, to being patient. That 
was something I wasn’t very good at when I 
was younger. 

Q19: So if you could go back in time and give 
your younger self advice you’ve learned over 
the past couple of decades, would patience be 
part of it? 

MURPHY: Yeah. Also, it’s such a privilege 
to actually be working in an industry where 
there are far too many actors and not enough 
jobs. That’s avital lesson. Then, every job you 
take, whether it succeeds or fails, whether you 
have a good time or a bad time, you can learn 
something from it. I don’t always get to that 
place, but as I get older I really think that’s 
important. 

Q20: For a while after Red Eye came out people 
would freak out when you sat next to them on 
planes. Does that still happen? 

MURPHY: No. Movies come and go and disap- 
pear; they're sort ofephemeral, transitory. So 
yeah, there was a while backin 2006 when peo- 
ple would say, “Oh. Fucking. God.” [laughs] 
But that time has long since passed. ш 


PROFILE 


SENATOR 
FLAKE 


VS. 


THE NEW 
NORMAL 


A closer look at the Republican statesman who dropped out of the race to protest his own 
party's leader—and the forces that led him to that precipitous moment on the Senate floor 


Taped to the refrigerator in the house Jeff 
Flake grew up in was a three-by-five-inch card 
smeared with baking residue. As described in 
his 2017 book, Conscience of a Conservative, the 
card read, “Assume the best. Look for the good.” 
“T wish everyone lived by that,” the Arizona 
senator says, smiling, “but the best I can do is to 
try and live it myself.” We're talking 
outside the Senate two weeks after he 
took the floor to announce he would 
not be running for reelection this 
year—a speech that made waves worldwide for 
its frank denouncements of a “new normal” in 
American politics, defined in the speech as “the 
accommodation of anew and undesirable order." 
Asked if he believes the current leadership might 
ever embrace the fridge wisdom of Flake’s youth, 
he is sanguine; he shakes his head and keeps the 
smile. “As I said, I wish everyone lived by that. 
Iam so thankful my parents gave me this as a 
creed and I've passed it on to my children." 
Folksy moments like these aside, Senator 
Flake can be hard to pin down. He’s often reluc- 
tant to speak with people he doesn’t know, but 
reporters who cover the Senate regularly say he 
can become quite loquacious as he walks the 
halls of the Capitol. He looks like a Hollywood 


ILLUSTRATION BY EVGENY PARFENOV 


в BRIAN J. 
KAREM 


leading man, but with his nose bent slightly 
askew, he also has an everyman charm that 
attracts voters. And though he’s been elected 
several times to the House of Representatives, 
starting in 2000, and once to the Senate, he has 
not always been popular. 

A staunch conservative—and, many would 
say, an enemy to some key liberal 
causes—Senator Flake is also a 
vocal supporter of sane and wel- 
coming immigration policy. A de- 
vout Mormon, he spoke at the Islamic Center 
of the North East Valley in Scottsdale, Arizona 
in late 2015. His tone brought to mind Barack 
Obama more than any other recent leader. 

“Tt is well known by those in this room but 
certainly underappreciated around the coun- 
try that Muslim Americans have fought and 
died alongside Christians, Jews and others in 
every war our nation has fought since the Rev- 
olution, including most recently in Iraq and 
Afghanistan,” he said. His speech even took 
on a personal perspective: “Muslims make 
the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. The 
Mormon hajj is to our holy temple. Because, 
like Muslims, Mormons do not drink alcohol, 
our trip to the temple is usually followed by a 


stop at Dairy Queen. Ice cream is about all we 
Mormons have. I’m not sure if there’s a corol- 
lary for Muslims.” 

Flake stood out in the early days of Donald 
Trump’s campaign for opposing immigra- 
tion restriction—the infamous “wall” being 
one of the early components of the Trump 
stump speech. “When reevaluating immigra- 
tion policy, it is right to give priority, through 
a point system or otherwise, to those who have 
skills and abilities unique to the new economy,” 
Flake wrote in an August 2017 op-ed for The New 
York Times. “But there must always bea place in 
America for those whose only initial credentials 
are astrong back and an eagerness to use it.” 

When it comes to guns, Flake gets an A grade 
from the NRA, which endorsed his Senate run. 
Still, he has been known to skew leftward on 
gun control—with firsthand experience of a 
mass shooting to back up his arguments. He 
was present the day House Majority Whip Steve 
Scalise was shot on a baseball diamond in Alex- 
andria, Virginia last June. 

“It was horrifying,” Flake says. “You hear the 
bullets and see your friends running for safety. 
You know you're not safe. I can't describe it ad- 
equately, but no one should have to go through 


т 


that. No one.” Since then, Flake has echoed 
calls for stricter laws in the wake of the shoot- 
ings in Las Vegas and Texas. 

And while Flake has often voted in line with 
President Trump—some 91 percent of the time, 
according to Democratic National Commit- 
tee chairman Tom Perez—he has apparently 
come to believe that opposing the president is 
more important than enacting legislation upon 
which both men agree. 

His conservative bona 
fides have never been 
in question. The Ameri- 
can Conservative Union 
rates him at 93 percent, 
FreedomWorks at 95 
percent—his worst marks 
among those given by six 
of the top conservative and 
limited-government orga- 
nizations. Americans for 
Prosperity gives him a 97 
percent rating. The Na- 
tional Taxpayers Union 
grades himan A. 

The family portrait on 
his website resembles a 
lightly updated version of 
Happy Days, and his crit- 
ics often accuse him of es- 
pousing a 1950s view of 
America that no longer 
exists, if it ever did in the 
first place. But regardless 
of his stance on issues, 
few doubted his sincer- 
ity when he stood on the A 
floor of the Senate and an- 
nounced he wouldn’t run. 

House Minority Leader 
Nancy Pelosi tells PLAYBOY 
she wasn't all that sur- ro 
prised by Flake’s decision. 
“It took a lot of courage,” 
she says. “But I remember 
him taking on earmark 
legislation when he was 
in the House. We gave him what we called ‘the 
Flake Hour’ and he would go after earmarks. 
Oftentimes nothing happened, but he took it 
on earnestly.” 

Flake often broached the discretionary 
spending of his colleagues—funds provided 
to help specific causes and special interests by 
circumventing the normal legislative process. 
He even took on earmarks in a piece of Pelosi 
legislation. “I told you he had courage,” she says 
with a laugh. “He's very true to himself. You al- 
ways know where you stand with him." 


CON 


LEJE( 


DESTRU( 


PRIN( 


In that light, Flake's mercurial nature looks 
less like political flip-flopping and more like 
the work of a man who, whether you agree with 
him or not, genuinely prizes old-fashioned in- 
tegrity over the party line. 

Self-sacrifice and hard work, family and church 
have always been staples of Flake's life. Born in 
Snowflake, Arizona, a town partially named for 
hisgreat-greatgrandfather, Flake grew up work- 


“ТАМ VERY HAPPY 
WITH MY WORK IN THE 
SENATE, BUT IT DOESN'T 

DEFINEWHOIAM." 


AKI 


SCIENCE 


of a 


CONSERVATIVE 


мет, 


TION OI 
TIVE 


POLITICS 


RN 


KELI 


Left: The book that launched Flake onto the world stage. Right: Facing reporters 


shortly after his moment on the Senate floor. 


ing on the family cattle ranch. “Believe me,” he 
says, “ifyou live опа cattle ranch, then you work." 

Flake admits it was a cloistered existence. 
“Just to let you know how sheltered I was, not 
until I went away to college did I find out flake 
was a funny term,” he says. “Nobody made fun 
of Flakes in Snowflake.” 

At an early age he also acquainted himself 
with the value of learning things the hard way. 
As recalled in his autobiography, he lost the tip 
of his right index finger at the age of five while 
workingon amachine used to rake freshly mown 


alfalfa into rows. “Yeah,” he says, “I lost part of 
a finger. But I was young. I laugh about it now.” 

Considered by most who know him as a man 
of genuine affection, he is the married father of 
five children. “Iam very happy with my workin 
the Senate,” he says, “but it doesn’t define who 
Iam. My top memories are of family, personal 
relationships and church.” He has been called 
a poster boy for his religion and has served as 
а missionary in Africa. A staunch conservative 
who opposes abortion and 
gay marriage and who has 
served as executive direc- 
tor of the Goldwater Insti- 
tute, he seemed a natural 
and important ally for 
Donald Trump. 

But Flake didn’t see 
Trump as a savior of the 
conservative movement; 
he saw him as a fake, a 
liar and a used-car sales- 
man who threatened not 
only the GOP but the en- 
tire country—a bully who 
substituted bombast for 
political skills. Flake’s 
criticisms often made him 
sound like the senators 
across the aisle, but Flake 
dismisses any suggestion 
that he’s switching sides. 

“Tjust speak my mind,” 
he says with a smile. 

"The thing about Jeff," 
one Hill staffer says, “he 
doesn'tliketo make deals 
with the devil. He be- 
lieves what he believes. 
And he doesn't believe in 
putting the party ahead 
ofthe country." 

"It's more important to 
me that I can sleep with 
myself and face my chil- 
dren,” Flake says. 
Senator Flake’s full complexity came glinting 
through during his Senate-floor speech, as 
well as in the giddy moments before and after. 
That day he presented himself as both canny 
and earnest—and possibly the closest thing we 
have to a politician who can coax the political 
temperament away from the brink and back 
toward the middle. 

Flake walked slowly toward the U.S. Senate 
from his nearby office in the Russell build- 
ing. His Kirk Douglas-worthy chin led the way, 
and his dark blue suit followed. Reporters who 


98 


caught him going into the Capitol knew he was 
scheduled to speak, but no one, with the excep- 
tion of a very few of his closest aides and family 
members, knew what the Arizona senator with 
the piercing blue eyes would say that day. 

Several reporters shouted questions to that 
effect as he strode to the Capitol. 

He smiled. “Wait and see,” he said. He 
brushed his hands through his hair as he 
walked the halls. He did nothing to give away 
the gravity of the speech or the passion he 
would show on the floor of the Senate. 

Less than an hour later, he walked out of the 
Capitol holding his wife Cheryl’s hand and 
making his way through the many reporters 
trying to corner him. 

“The guy just changed the world,” one of 
them said. 

On the floor, Senator Flake had recited a 
laundry list of Trump’s worst habits without 
once saying his name: “the personal attacks, 
the threats against principles, freedoms and 
institutions, and the flagrant disregard for 
truth and decency, the reckless provocations, 
most often for the pettiest and most personal 
reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to 
do with the fortunes of the people that we have 
been elected to serve.” 

He upbraided the president for pushing policy 
via Twitter, and he pushed back at the GOP, argu- 
ing that the party was splintering and becoming 
irrelevant. “Itis clear at this moment that atradi- 
tional conservative, who believes in limited gov- 
ernment and free markets, who is devoted to free 
trade, who is pro-immigration, has a narrower 
and narrower path to nomination in the Repub- 
lican Party, the party that has so long defined it- 
self by its belief in those things. It’s also clear to 
me for the moment that we have given in or given 
up onthe core principles in favor ofa more viscer- 
ally satisfying anger and resentment." 

Taking care to avoid alienating the presi- 
dent's base, he added, “To be clear, the anger and 
resentment that the people feel at the royal mess 
that we’ve created are justified, but anger and 
resentment are not a governing philosophy.” 

As Independent Journal Review reporter 
Haley Byrd tweeted following his speech, Flake 
received a standing ovation from Republican 
senators Mitch McConnell, Bob Corker, John 
Barrasso and Todd Young. The speech also 
brought cheers from Democrats including sen- 
ators Chris Coons, Tim Kaine, Maggie Hassan 
and Jeff Merkley. Fellow Arizona senator John 
McCain later praised the speech at a press gag- 
gle: “I have seen Jeff Flake stand up for what he 
believes in knowing full well that there would 
bea political price to pay. I have seen him stand 
up for his family. I’ve seen him stand up for his 


TEXT "TRUMP "to 88022 
Raleigh, North Carolina 


MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! 


Adversary and ally: Donald Trump and Senator Bob Corker on the campaign trail in 2016. 


forebears.... When Flake’s service to this coun- 
try is reviewed, it will be one of honor, of bril- 
liance and patriotism and love of country.” 

Predictably, the speech struck a nerve with 
Trump, who tweeted out at least three jabs. He 
suggested that Flake was a weak senator and 
couldn’t win even if he did run. Flake, in a re- 
flective moment a week after his announce- 
ment, replied that while the president may 
have had a point, the real reason is far greater. 
“We used to be able to run on policies. Now it’s 
all about the president and if you support him— 
and I’m not going to condone his behavior.” 
While no one can say how he or she will come 
across in future history books, or even if those 
books will record their efforts at all, Flake 
staked his claim on the floor of the Senate for 
things that have apparently disappeared from 
the American body politic: spirited debate 
without rancor, and honor before party. 

“We were not made great as a country by in- 
dulging or even exalting our worst impulses, 
turning against ourselves, glorying in the 
things which divide us and calling fake things 
true and true things fake,” Flake said. 

The senator’s immediate future is either un- 
known or a closely guarded secret, but there’s 
a sense that the gloves are off. On the day sev- 
eral women came forward to accuse GOP senate 


nominee Roy Moore of sexual harassment, Flake 
renewed his fight against the “moral rot” some 
have described inside the Republican Party. 

“No. No. No,” he told a group of cameras and 
reporters in the basement of the Russell Sen- 
ate Office building when asked if he would ever 
support Moore. “He should not continue his 
campaign.” Flake wanted the man, who is now 
endorsed by President Trump, to step down. 
Another quiet attack on the new normal. 

As he strode through the halls of the U.S. 
Capitol following his October speech, he 
looked like a man at peace with himself—a man 
who'd gotten it off his chest and was resigned 
to an uncertain future but hopeful he’d played 
apartin shaping it. 

Republicans who espousethe old-world view of 
conservatism see Flake as a vital player in the re- 
alignment the party is undergoing; others, who 
see the outgoing senator as Tea Party before the 
Tea Party was cool, say they don't want Flake in- 
volved in the GOP going forward. The bottom line 
is that Flake will have as much input as he wants. 

Some have encouraged him to run for pres- 
ident, but he laughs off that suggestion. “One 
man sent me a check for $20.20 and said I 
should run for president,” he says. “I’m not 
going to cash the check, but I appreciate it. 
After all, with a name like Flake, you can only 
rise so high in national politics.” и 


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-Phe Golden: AGA sits on one of the world's HE 
Harvey, it became ground zero.in thew war be 


PHOTOGRAPHY “BY 


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hd 


The refineries appear on the horizon about 20 
miles west of Port Arthur, Texas, smokestacks 
and twisted piping all pallid gray against the 
clear morning sky. It's nearly a month and a 
half after Hurricane Harvey made landfall on 
the Gulf Coast, and I’m on Texas Highway 73, 
heading east from Houston 
sYPETER toward the Golden Triangle, 
SIMEK a small region of the state 
tucked between the Gulf of 

Mexico and the Louisiana border. 

I’m drawn to the place by a peculiar irony. In 
1901 an Austrian-born mechanical engineer 
punched a hole in the ground at a place called 
Spindletop and discovered an oil well from 
which gushed 100,000 barrels of crude a day. 
The size of the discovery, unprecedented at the 
time, kick-started the era of cheap fossil fuel. 
Today the Golden Triangle remains a major cen- 
ter of the petrochemical industry, home to North 
America’s largest oil refinery and responsible 
for approximately 8.5 percent of all U.S. oil refin- 
ing. It is also a sitting duck for increasingly de- 
structive tropical storms, coastline erosion and 
sea-level rise—events that scientists attribute 
to human-assisted climate change. Hurricane 
Harvey offered a preview. Over five days, up- 
ward of 40 inches of rain fell on the region, caus- 
ing floods that wiped entire towns off the map. 

Highway 73 cuts through sodden bottom- 
land. Off the side of the road, cattle mill about 
in scrubby sage. A heron takes flight from the 
lavender-tinged blue of an estuarial pool. Here 
the Texas Gulf Coast is a no-man's-land between 
sea and earth, shaped by the continual lurching 
and ebbing of waters. But the refineries offer a 
grim reminder: Scientists project that at some 
point within the next century, because of warm- 
ing oceans and melting polar ice caps, all of it will 
be subjected to chronic flooding or submerged 
by rising seas. This out-of-the-way corner of the 
world is a front line in the global war against cli- 
mate change, one that is harder to ignore than 
the vanishing Pacific Islands or the desertifica- 
tion of sub-Saharan Africa. Here, at the birth- 
place of domestic Big Oil, the industry’s major 
players find themselves facing head-on the cata- 
strophic planetary change they helped set in mo- 
tion. And it is no longer a question of when. After 
Harvey, it is clear: Change has already begun. 
Port Arthur, population about 55,000, sits at 
the southern tip of the Golden Triangle, which 
counts the small cities of Beaumont and Orange 
as its other two points. The region’s municipali- 
ties are a collection of in-betweens—a blend of 
industrial and rural, economically inequitable, 
proud but struggling, diverse yet polarized. The 
refineries are owned by the world’s wealthiest 
corporations and sit in foreign-trade zones. De- 
mographically it’s roughly split in half: Jefferson 


113 


County, the region’s largest, voted for Donald 
Trump but in the same election put a female 
African American Democrat in the sheriff's of- 
fice. The unemployment rate is double the na- 
tional average, and the median income is about 
$15,000 less than that of the U.S. as a whole. 

I arrive in Port Arthur late in the morning 
and drive through the downtown of early-20th 
century brick high-rises and boarded-up store- 
fronts, all of them scarred by hurricanes or 
blight or both. Harvey’s effects are clear. You 
can trace the path of the floodwater by following 
the heaps of trash on the curb: rotten mattresses, 
torn-out carpet, waterlogged sofas and crumpled 
drywall. Among the soggy cardboard boxes and 
taped-up refrigerators, some are sprayed with 
yellow paint that reads DO NOT TAKE or NOT FOR 
SALE. Across from a hardware store, where pick- 
ups load up on Sheetrock, the facade of a shut- 
tered storefront bears another spray-painted 
message: GOD BLESS EVERYONE. 

When the rain came, most people knew 
to evacuate. Gerald Durham, an elderly 
man I find in front of his Bridge City home, 
sipping coffee while neighbors stack trash 
at the curb, drove to Louisiana and stayed 
at a motel to wait out the deluge. When he 
returned he was relieved to find the water 
came only to the top of his front-porch step. 

Edward Sanders wasn’t so lucky. He man- 
aged Port Arthur’s civic center, which was 
converted to a shelter during the storm. He 
remembers watching the rain pour down 
and thinking, It’s going to stop soon; it has 
to stop. The rain did stop, but not before 
the reservoir to the north of his home had 
overflowed and flooded it with three feet 
of water. Still, Sanders says, some of his 
neighbors’ homes took in twice that much. 

The damage can appear random—one 
house a total loss, its neighbor appar- 
ently untouched. The disconnect between peo- 
ple trudging through the grind of recovery 
and small-town life resuming its sleepy course 
makes everything feel eerie. The people and 
places I find most alive are the ones that seem 
somehow stuck in crisis mode—still tapped 
into the initial adrenaline, resilience and re- 
solve that gave birth to the catchphrase “Texas 
Strong” in the hours after the storm and led to 
an uptick in the number of Texas-themed tat- 
toos at local parlors. 

Stopping at what looks like a clothing drive 
in front of a community-policing storefront in 
Bridge City, I find Gwen Prine and Lee Morrison, 
two Alabamans who came to Texas and started 
a homespun relief organization called Thumbs 
Up on a Mission for Jesus. They’ve been gath- 
ering supplies—diapers, clothes, water, bleach, 


household items and food—and distributing 
them door-to-door nearly every day for weeks. 

Prine wears rolled-up jeans, flip-flops and a 
T-shirt with a map of Alabama on the back. She 
decided to come to Texas, she says, after she re- 
ceived a vision in which the Lord told her to go 
help the flood victims. The next day, she packed 
a pickup full of supplies and headed south. When 
she and Morrison arrived in Texas, much of the 
area was still underwater, and Interstate 10 was 
shut down. A policeman told them to turn around. 

“Well,” Prine says she told the officer, “the 
Lord filled this truck up with water and supplies 
and told us we've got to go to Orange.” 

The officer looked at the barricade and then 
back at Prine and her truck. 

“If you serve the same Lord I serve, you go 
right around that barricade and he'll part them 
waters,” he said. 

They drove on, following a thin strip in the 


“THELORD, 
HE SETS HOW 
EVERYTHING IS 


GOING TO BE. HE LL 
TAKE CARE OF US. 


center of the road with the floodwaters pulsing 
on either side. When they arrived at North Or- 
ange Pentecostal Church, they unloaded their 
supplies with the pastor. 

"Itwas down for maybe an hour or two," Prine 
remembers. “It was like the exact time we were 
there, the water receded." 

Outside I chat with a local resident who is 
helping the women with the drive. I ask if he's 
concerned about the scientific projections 
that weather events like Harvey may be com- 
ing more frequently. 

“The Lord, he sets how everything is going to 
be,” he tells me. “It is in his hands on all that. 
He'll take care of us. I believe it." 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin- 
istration predicts that the sea level at Sabine 


Pass, a natural outlet from Sabine Lake into the 
Gulf of Mexico that serves as a major shipping 
route for the Golden Triangle's petrochemical 
industry, will rise up to nearly seven feet by the 
year 2100. Some models anticipate higher rises if 
global carbon emissions continue to escalate. A 
map tool NOAA created to demonstrate the im- 
pact this will have on the Gulf Coast shows the 
slow creep of narrow blue waters fingering their 
way up available channels and low-lying areas, 
eroding barrier islands and eating away at the 
coastline and even portions of settled land. 

But renderings like these may not accu- 
rately portray what will happen to the coast 
when the sea rises. John Anderson, an ocean- 
ographer at Rice University, says that most 
projections focus on overall sea-level rise, but 
he's concerned about the rate of rise. When you 
look at the last major period of sea-level rise, at 
the end of the Ice Age, high rates of rise facili- 

tated more-rapid erosion of coastal areas, 
resulting in surging seas that moved in- 
land more quickly. If the rate of erosion 
continues to increase, Anderson says, a 
couple of feet of sea-level rise on the Gulf 
Coast could mean as much as 30 feet of lost 
coastline a year. 

Rising seas will only intensify the ef- 
fects of strengthening storms. This part of 
the Gulf Coast is well versed in hurricanes, 
but no one here had ever seen anything like 
Harvey. The storm’s severity resulted from 
two peculiar phenomena: the incredible 
volume of moisture it picked up off an un- 
usually warm Gulf of Mexico, and the way 
the system stalled over southeast Texas. 
Scientists are not yet sure what caused the 
latter. Since 2010, the continental wind sys- 
tems that would have pushed the hurricane 
northward have collapsed, and disruptions 
in atmospheric flows caused by a warming 

climate could bea factor. What scientists are sure 
about is that the warming climate supercharged 
Harvey. When it came across the Yucatan, Har- 
vey was barely a tropical storm. Then, after hit- 
ting a warmer-than-usual Gulf of Mexico, it grew 
into a category 4 hurricane within 48 hours. 

The science is clear: Sea levels are rising, 
storms are getting stronger, and if nothing 
is done to curb carbon emissions, things will 
only get worse. Increasingly the American pub- 
lic agrees. According to a 2017 Gallup poll, the 
percentage of Americans who believe in global 
warming and attribute its cause to human ac- 
tivities is on the rise. Even among those who 
voted for Trump in the last election, only one 
in three does not believe that global warming is 
happening. And in recent years, most oil com- 
panies have admitted to their investors and the 


114 


Previous spread: Carol Smith strolls through what's left of her neighborhood in Rose City. This page, clockwise from top left: Nathaniel Welch works on a home in Mauriceville. Chris 
Duplant and his daughter Shelley pose at his home in Groves. Smith assesses the damage to her home. A volunteer sorts through donations received by the city of Port Arthur. 


public that they are aware of the risks related to 
global climate change. 

In a speech at an energy conference in 2016, 
Saudi Aramco president and chief executive 
officer Amin Nasser called addressing climate 
change and the environmental sustainability 
of the planet a "critical objective." (Saudi Ar- 
amco owns the Motiva refinery, the largest in 
North America anda pillar ofthe Golden Trian- 
gle.) An ExxonMobil statement entitled “Our 
Position on Climate Change” speaks about the 
need both to address the challenges of climate 
change and tolift “billions out of poverty,” call- 
ing for constructive political dialogue and cit- 
ing its own attempts to reduce greenhouse-gas 
emissions in its operations. 

“The risk of climate change is clear and the 
risk warrants action,” the statement reads. 
“There is a broad scientific and policy consen- 
sus that action must be taken to further quantify 
and assess the risks.” (When I ask an Exxon- 
Mobil spokesperson via e-mail to speak about 
whether Harvey, and climate change in general, 
had affected the corporation’s long-range plan- 
ning with regard to its Golden Triangle facilities, 
she sends an e-mail with links to internally pro- 
duced articles that trumpet the company’s resil- 
ience in weathering Harvey and the work of its 


engineering teams in restoring the refineries to 
full operating capacity.) 

But climate change remains a polarizing po- 
litical issue. Last year, President Trump an- 
nounced that the United States would withdraw 
from the Paris Accord and in 2012 tweeted 
that global warming is a Chinese conspiracy. 
Big media outlets tend to ignore the issue. Ac- 
cording to a Media Matters analysis, during the 
two weeks of coverage leading up to and after 
Harvey, only one of the three major television 
networks even discussed climate change as it 
related to the storm. 

“In Texas there are a lot of vested interests to 
argue against climate-change regulation,” says 
climate scientist Andrew Dessler, professor of 
atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University 
and co-author of The Science and Politics of 
Global Climate Change: A Guide to the Debate. 
“In their hearts, I think they know it is true.” 
At the foot of the Rainbow Bridge, which spans 
the mouth of the Neches River as it enters Sa- 
bine Lake, a dirt road runs past a shuttered bait 
shop, a marina and some small warehouses. 
Nearby, a large earthmover sits on an earthen 
levee, lifting huge clumps of black, silty soil 
and dumping it on top of the mound. 


Next door in a small warehouse I meet Mary 
Burdine, owner of DBS Electronics, a marine 
electronics company that services tugboats in 
the channel. Burdine sits behind an old alumi- 
num desk, wearing a gray T-shirt and glasses, 
her brown hair pulled up in a ponytail. The 
earthmover, she explains, has nothing to do 
with the storm. She believes it’s part of the on- 
going expansion of the Total Petrochemicals 
USA refinery that sits across the marsh from 
her business. Dredging for the expansion has 
affected drainage in the entire area, causing 
water to back up into the farmers’ market up 
the road and silt to fill in the canal behind the 
office. Burdine says she doesn’t mind the refin- 
ery expansion—“When I smell stink, I smell 
money,” she says—but is ticked off that the 
government agencies tasked with overseeing 
the expansion aren’t protecting her land from 
its impact. 

“They always pass the buck,” she says. “No- 
body has an answer. No one has а solution to the 
problem they created down there.” 

Burdine’s frustration hints at an aspect of 
climate change often overlooked in sea-level 
calculations and the fear of superstorms: 
The human cost will not be felt merely by sci- 
entifically measured effects but also by how 


115 


т 


Clockwise from top left: An oil tanker traverses the Intracoastal Waterway near Port Arthur. Richard LeBlanc, general manager of Jefferson County Drainage District 6, stands near 
a drainage project the county had been developing prior to Harvey. North Beaumont resident Chris Edwards assesses his mother’s home, which took in six feet of water. 


industry and government respond and adapt 
to the gradual changes. In a small though not 
insignificant way, this remote marina, where 
a farmers’ market is almost permanently 
flooded and a canal that supports a small busi- 
ness needs to be dredged, shows that chess 
game already in progress. And Burdine knows 
it will only get worse. 

"Thesealevelis comingup. That'sagiven," she 
says. “The icebergs are melting. That's a given. 
It doesn't take a genius to figure that one out." 

The road south toward Sabine Pass bisects 
the Valero and Motiva refineries. Pipes zig- 
zag in every direction, hissing as they run 
up from the ground, pass over the road and 
plunge back into the earth. Smokestacks spit 
huge clouds of ashen white smoke. Mountains 
of black coal sit adjacent to plump cylindrical 
storage containers and rounded white orbs of 
pressurized gas. 

The major oil companies may have admitted 
they're aware of the impending threats of cli- 
mate change, but none of them appears to be 
going anywhere. Total's dredging near Rainbow 
Bridge is presumably part ofa $1.7 billion expan- 
sion, and Saudi Aramco plans to invest in a simi- 
lar project to the tune of up to $30 billion. 

“They know the sea level is rising. They’ve 
done some risk-reward calculations—how much 


does it cost?” says Dessler. “The big corpora- 
tions are not what I’m worried about. What’s 
going to hurt the economy is people getting 
flooded. It is a socially destabilizing force.” 

Most of the media coverage of climate change 
frames its effects cinematically: the gaping 
caves of Antarctic ice sheets; the rushing melted 
water boring moulins in Greenland’s white ex- 
panse; animations of rising seas contracting 
around the New York skyline like a great blue py- 
thon. But most of the millions of people whose 
lives will be transformed by climate change will 
experience those changes like the people strug- 
gling with Harvey’s aftermath, in a thousand 
subtle, insidious ways—ways that might not even 
seem, on the surface, to have anything to do with 
carbon dioxide emissions. 

Initially, Harvey fit the climate-change 
cinematic narrative, providing television 
networks with around-the-clock disaster- 
film outtakes—images of ordinary suburban 
homes flooded to the rooflines. But most of the 
news cameras left before the owners of those 
homes experienced Harvey’s social destabi- 
lization: the physical and psychological tor- 
ment of hauling furniture to the curb, tearing 
out Sheetrock, buying gallons of bleach, scrub- 
bing black mold, sifting through waterlogged 
papers, struggling to maintain employment 


116 


and trying to decide what, if anything, from 
life before Harvey is worth salvaging. 

Perhaps the scariest thing about Harvey was 
notits scale or the drama of its monstrous wind, 
rain and floods, but the way the hurricane re- 
vealed who would bear the weight of future 
natural disasters. Rising seas will continue to 
redraw coastlines, but climate change is not a 
purely natural phenomenon. The broader de- 
stabilizing forces Dessler describes will follow 
socioeconomic fault lines as well. 

In Rose City, population 523, all but a single 
home was submerged up to its roofline. 

The town is nestled in a dark, swampy forest 
in the Neches River floodplain, just southwest 
of a large sand-and-gravel operation. Driving 
its streets, one encounters devastation like no- 
where else in the region. Houses sit rotting in the 
afternoon heat, some with windows gone, others 
missing entire walls. Mold is visible on interior 
studs and exterior eaves. Trash piles are every- 
where. An entire chimney, still connected to its 
fireplace, sits in ауага near the curb. 

Near the little one-story City Hall, a make- 
shift disaster-relief center built out of shipping 
containers distributes supplies. A volunteer 
directs me toward Eric Klein, CEO and founder 
of Can-Do, a disaster-relief nonprofit based 


in Marina del Rey, California that is run- 
ning the relief operation in Rose City. Klein, 
who appears to be in his 40s, wears a black T- 
shirt, jeans, earbuds and acamouflage hat. He 
founded Can-Do after receiving a settlement 
from а car accident, and the organization has 
since deployed to areas affected by Katrina, 
Rita, Ike, the earthquake in Haiti and other 
disaster zones. In 2008 he was a contestant on 
Oprah’s philanthropy-themed reality-TV show 
The Big Give. 

Today Klein looks tired. It has been a month 
and a half since the storm, and none of the 
homes in Rose City is habitable, and the city 
still doesn’t have running water. The relief or- 
ganizations, he says, are nowhere to be found. 
The Red Cross showed up the day before to reg- 
ister residents for aid but simply parked its 
branded truck on the most visible street corner 
and handed out 1-800 numbers. It’s a familiar 
shtick, says Klein, who mentions a Pro- 
Publica report on the Red Cross response 
in Haiti that found the organization had 
spent little of the millions donated to it 
on tangible relief efforts. FEMA has been 
similarly useless, Klein says, in advising 
residents to go down to the government 
staging center to ask for a $2,000 reloca- 
tion grant that Klein says turns out to be 
a dead end. 

Looking at the homes in Rose City, it’s 
difficult to picture what $2,000 will do. 
And recovery from the flooding goes be- 
yond simply fixing homes: The Gulf Coast 
lost about 27,000 jobs in the aftermath of 
the hurricane, and long-term health is- 
sues related to mosquito-borne illnesses, 
mold, stress and anxiety are only starting 
to surface. The Gulf Coast Health Center 
reports 10 percent more patients than 
this time last year, with locals complain- 
ing about breathing problems and rashes. 
Doctors are providing patients with hepa- 
titis A vaccines and insect repellent to pro- 
tect against Zika virus. Some doctors warn 
that prolonged contact with mold can lead to 
neurological disorders. Even if the aid were 
reaching all the victims, there are some things 
money alone can’t fix. 

The region seems to be slipping into a new 
phase of recovery: a period filled less with the 
essential concerns of the day-to-day and more 
with uncertainty and fear for the future. It chal- 
lenges the assumptions that fuel the outpour- 
ing of goodwill that tends to follow a national 
tragedy. The scale, complexity and frequency of 
events like Harvey are only increasing, and their 
intensity suggests that the existing social safety 
net and our storied American grit may not be 


enough. This new phase arrives with a sinking 
feeling that, despite the massive mobilization of 
government services and the billions of dollars 
in philanthropy, at the end of the day we're all 
on our own. 

What if a Harvey happens once a year or every 
other year or even every four years? Perhaps 
the question is no longer hypothetical. This 
past year saw hurricanes Harvey and Irma hit 
the mainland United States and Maria pum- 
mel Puerto Rico. Wildfires ravaged northern 
California after changing climate patterns 
fueled record-high temperatures and abnor- 
mally powerful winds. Each of those events re- 
ceived its moment of around-the-clock media 
coverage and philanthropic zeal before public 
attention drifted to the next catastrophe. And 
each of those areas is full of what Harvey left 
scattered across the Golden Triangle: individ- 


"NO DNE HAS 
A SOLUTION TO 
THE PROBLEM 
THEY CREATED 
DOWN THERE.” 


uals struggling to find a way forward. 
Heading out of town, I follow one last trail of 
trash to a buried bayou that runs under Man- 
ning Street in North Beaumont on its way to the 
Neches River. The street is dotted with 80-year- 
old shotgun shacks and tiny bungalows. Chris 
Edwards stands outside his mother’s gutted 
home. From the stoop you can see the blackened 
studs inside and smell the deep, noxious funk 
of mold. Edwards says his uncle did most of the 
demo work, though Edwards tried to help when 
he wasn’t at his job as an operator at Exxon- 
Mobil. His uncle sits on the stoop with a cigarette 
dangling from his lips, staring at the ground. 
The family has lived on the land for decades; 
their cousins live up the street. In all those years, 
he says, the water never even came over the curb. 
He can’t understand how the flood could have 


been so bad this time, and he’s adamant that it 
must be related to the release of reservoir waters. 
But Richard LeBlanc, general manager of Jef- 
ferson County Drainage District 6, says North 
Beaumont flooded after the massive amount of 
rain that fell in the largely undeveloped land to 
the north of town percolated down the watershed 
and, over the course of a few days, overwhelmed 
the Neches River and its bayou tributaries. 

Standing in front of Edwards’s ruined family 
home, it hardly seems to matter what you be- 
lieve about the cause of all this heartbreak and 
devastation. The result is the same. 

“It's sad, man,” Edwards says. “You knowthe 
people who work their whole life trying to put 
something together, and then your whole life is 
out there in the street, in the trash pile.” 

“What will your mother do?” I ask. 

“She’s just accepting it for what it is,” he says. 
“It’s all you can do. You just got to accept it for 

what it is and try to move on best you can. 
It’s hard. It’s a hard blow. But that’s life. You 
either sit around and cry about it or pick up 
and try to keep on going.” 

Before I head out of town, I decide 
to look for Spindletop, the place that 
started it all. I find a granite obelisk sit- 
ting in a pristine grassy meadow adja- 
cent to a quaint museum fashioned after 
atiny frontier town. But upon reading the 
marker, I discover that it doesn’t in fact 
mark the spot of Spindletop. The monu- 
ment was moved some years back because 
decades of digging, drilling and pump- 
ing for oil, natural gas, sulphur, sand 
and gravel at the actual site had left the 
ground ravaged and unstable. I drive a 
mile south trying to find the location of 
the original well; it’s barricaded by a web 
of railroad tracks and barbwire fences 
guarding patches of industrial wasteland. 

I keep hearing the voice of Chris Edwards. 
What does it mean to “keep on going” when 
faced with forces as colossal as a changing cli- 
mate? It’s hard to ignore the parallel between 
our trajectory and the history of Spindletop: 
using up the earth until there’s nothing left. 

But Edwards’s remarks speak to another ur- 
gent question: How we are going to prepare for 
the change we already know is on the way? If 
Hurricane Harvey is any indication, our cur- 
rent answer is to allow those with the means to 
get out of the way while leaving the rest to fend 
for themselves—the de facto disposition of a so- 
ciety still caught in denial of its own fate. Re- 
versing that attitude won't be easy, but it might 
begin with the resolve Edwards gave voice to in 
the face of disaster. The future may be stormy, 
but its story can still be written. [| 


117 


Y 


PLAYMATE 


jb DRE! 


February Playmate Megan Samperi has a lot to offer—if you can keep up with her 


“Twas raised dirt-biking, four-wheeling, all that fun stuff," says Megan 
Samperi, her enormous blue eyes darting with mischief. “I like going 
fast. I drive like a dude—one hand on the wheel, a leg up, chilling with 
my music. All my dude friends are actually scared of me driving.” Our 
February Playmate is that extra-rare breed of dream girl: the spunky 
and jaw-droppingly sexy tomboy. A 24-year-old model who loves foot- 
ball, ice hockey and kicking back by a bonfire, Megan also holds abach- 
elor's degree in biology. “I studied my butt off for quite some time,” 
she says. “That's my backup plan, but I just moved to the О.С. and I’m 
chasing my dreams.” 

Those dreams include acting and singing (she's recently picked up 
the acoustic guitar again after along hiatus) while improving her surf- 
ing skills. “One day ГИ shred,” she says. “For now, I’m learning.” Grow- 
ing up in Jupiter, Florida, 90 miles north of Miami, Megan spent most 


se 


of her time outdoors and learned to love horseback riding—while, of 
course, putting her own wild spin on it. “I used to jump horses. It’s 
actually really dangerous. You have to have aconnection with the horse 
before you do anything. I could sit in the barn all day, grooming horses, 
then ride bareback and be happy.” 

When it comes to men, this guy’s girl knows exactly what she wants. 
Just don’t expect her to put anyone in a box, herself included. “No one’s 
the same, so how can you have a type?” she says, adding, “I love extro- 
verted, intelligent men. Trust is big, and we both need to have separate 
lives. It’s sexy when a guy is independent, doing his own thing.” Megan, 
of course, is all about doing her own thing. “I don’t want to be any other 
person; I want to be myself. My attitude is to just live your life. Go with 
the flow. Go travel. Things will happen.” 

When it comes to this live wire, we can’t wait to see what happens next. 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTOPHER VON STEINBACH 


DATA SHEET 


BIRTHPLACE: Jupiter, Florida GURRENT CITY: Santa Ana, California 


WORSHIP YOUR WOMAN 


Real men get it. Men will look at 
PLAYBOY and be like, “Oh, wow, 
this is beautiful!” The body is 
freaking beautiful, and it’s attrac- 
tive when a guy shows off his girl. 
If I were a guy, I'd show off the hell 
out of my girl. “Look at this girl! 
Look at her ass!” Just kidding. 


DIVER DOWN 


Spearfishing is awesome. You just 
need to go with a lot of friends 
because | have friends who have 
blacked out in the water. The max 
I've gone is 50 feet and held my 
breath for a minute and a half. 


FRIEND ZONE 


I'm single and I'm just trying to 
stay friends with everybody. like 
to keep it chill, but then I'll meet 
someone with a great sense of 
humor and we'll connect right 
away. | just think it's important 


to find someone who appreci- 
ates you for who you are and not 
or what you look like. 


WILD LIFE 


love hunting, and | also love 
animals. | actually wanted to be a 
veterinarian. | shot my first buck 
ast year, and you know what— 
it was a great experience, even 
though I felt bad doing it. Then 
again, if certain animals weren't 
hunted they would overpopulate 
and kill off humans with disease. 
So maybe | saved somebody. 


SIMPLE PLEASURES 


Besides work, | love watching 
the surf, eating good food, hav- 
ing a good cup of coffee, hang- 
ing out with a bunch of friends 
and going on a hike. | like to go 
to bed early and wake up early if 
possible so | can have the whole 
day to do stuff. 


ff @megan_samperi 


NO OFFENSE 


I'm so inappropriate. If | offend 
anybody, ІЛІ say, “Oh, sorry | of- 
fended you,” and then I'll make a 
sarcastic joke and probably walk 
away. Sometimes | need to relax; 
other times everyone loves it. 
You have to be yourself. Listen to 
“Go Fuck Yourself” by Two Feet. 


LET’S MAKEUP 


| love dressing up and putting 
on sick makeup, but | don’t want 
everyone to gasp when | take it 
off. Some girls are like that, and | 
just tell them, “You're so beauti- 
ful without all that.” 


TOMBOY PROBLEMS 


Guys say they want a girl who 
rocks Vans and ripped jeans and 
acrop top. That's me. Then they 
end up with the one who goes to 
a restaurant to wear high heels 
for 30 minutes. 


DECEMBER 
Allie Leggett 
She may wear the 2013 Miss Kentucky 
tiara, but Allie’s spiritual home—and 
radiant persona—is California all the 
way. “You have to put yourself out 
there, she says “Take a chance.” 


Elizabeth 
Elam 

This small-town 
Oklahoma native 
helped us proclaim 
“Naked Is Normal” 

оп the cover of our 
March/April issue. “You 
can cry and still be 
‘manly,’” she says. “And 
as awoman, you can 
be smart and naked at 
the same time.” 


Nina Daniele 

Writing, photography, animal rescue and even pole- 
dancing are among this badass, big-hearted Bronx 
girl's passions. “I like pushing boundaries,” she says. 


AUGUST 
Liza Kei 


Kei can describe her- 
self in three words: 
“Funny, sexy, sarcastic.” 
To which we would add 
“cultured,” based on 
her FOMO-inducing 
Instagram feed. 


OCTOBER 
Milan Dixon 
Having spent five years pounding the 
Hollywood pavement while working at ТС! 
Fridays, our October Playmate has both heart 
and hustle. “What you're thinking, What you’re 
feeling in your heart—once you speak it, it can + A 
come to pass," says the Las Vegas native. 
те 
еее 
м 


$ 


хо SNe 
EEE EN ee 


A 


FE] | 1 
Joy Corrigan 
It's hard to picture Joy Corrigan 
blending in anywhere, but she's 
come a long way since her child- 
hood, spent with nine siblings on 
а small farm in North Carolina. “1 
grew up poor,” she says. "I didn't 
know drinking powdered milk and 
wearing hand-me-downs wasn't 


the norm." 


J 1 
Elsie Hewitt 
Born in London and indepen- 
dent since the age of 15, our June 
Playmate is inspired above all by sis- 
terhood. "Everybody should be lift- 
ing each other up, especially women," 
she says. "There are enough men 
who are awful to women; we all 
need to be nicer to each other." 


137 


Ines Rau 


For this Paris native and 


rising fashion model, 
taking the Playmate title 
was а historic (and, yes, 


controversial) move. “1 
lived a long time with- 
out saying | was trans- 
gender,” she says. “Then 
| was like, You know, you 
should just be who you 
are. It’s not about being 
loved by others; it’s 
about loving yourself.” 


ти 


a? 


= 
| 
o 


+ 


dis 
в - 


" d 


А 
> | 


JULY 

Dana Taylor 
Fellas, take heed if you 
wish to approach this 
Chicago native. (What can 
we say? We have a type.) 
With 11 years of competi- 
tive ice-skating under 

her belt, she has a fierce 
sense of self: "I'm a wild 


Bridget Malcolm 

girl, a free spirit, so when Trained oboist, devoted vegan and former Victoria’s 

| meet a guy, he has to be Secret Angel, our Aussie Playmate is perhaps most 
able to keep up with me.” 7% passionate about wellness. “Dedicate just 10 minutes а 
day to meditating,” she says. “It could change your life.” 


MAY 

Lada 
Kravchenko 
In addition to living 

the glamorous life of a 
jet-setting model, this 
Russian-born, New York- 
based Playmate is also 
atrained programmer: 
"Database systems and 
computer tech—that's my 
profession. I'm a nerd!" 


ev BAIRD HARPER 


^ 
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FICTION 


That's a fair question, Miss therapist, though it rouses 
a distasteful memory. Thinking back on how things 
went, I still believe I acted out of love, though you 
people will certainly take me for some kind of cow- 
ard. I do wish I'd told my wife the truth, but once I 


hadn't, there really was nothing to do but leave— 

Oh, hello, Bill, have a seat. You're not late. Or, I sup- 
pose you're quite late, but you haven't missed anything 
critical. Jose and Carol were just pointing out that I 
hadnt yet shared my tale of woe with the group, and 
then Miss therapist Kay started in with one of her open- 
ended questions, the answer to which was interrupted 


by your tardiness. But anyway, we're all here 


Okay, where was I? I was leaving my wife. 
Right, so what I did was this: I sold my collec- 
tion of lever-action rifles for a wad of travel- 
ing cash, I packed one good bag of clothes, and 
then I wrote a note whose brevity left nothing 
to chance. Dear Molly, I wrote. Please consider 
this our divorce paper. Everything not taken 
with me today I leave to you. Sorry for being 
such a pecker. Love always, Darrel. 

And it’s true that I did still love her. But over 
the years she’d come into the opinion that I 
belonged to her, as a house cat might. And 
while, in the light of most days, I was able to 
pardon this possessiveness as a side effect of 
Molly’s devotion to our marriage, when lying 
awake at night beside my wife, I found that her 
omnipresence had a truly suffocating effect. 
But if it’s all right with you people I’d prefer 
to stop short of explaining the exact reasons I 
decided to leave. Fair enough? 


Your point is valid, Miss therapist. I came 
here of my own volition, that's true. And I do 
recognize that the powers of a support group 
may be diminished if I withhold details, but I 
just don’t see the honor in trashing my wife in 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDWARD KINSELLA 


front of a bunch of strangers. Now don’t shake 
your heads. I can see the ties that bind us are 
real —you've all lost someone, and I have too— 
but Гд prefer to talk about the grief without 
constructing a litany of grievances. Do you 
understand why I’m reluctant? Do you see 
that I’m not one of these people whose grief 
is also anger? I’m all for anger when it hap- 
pens. Like Herb over there. Herb’s still livid 
that his brother gassed himself in the garage. 
I get it, Herb. I’d be pissed off too if one of my 
people took himself out like that. In fact, 
some years back, I had a dear friend who did 
exactly the same. 

One afternoon, out of nowhere, this dear 
friend’s wife called me up. “Oh, Darrel,” she 
said, “I need you right now!” I tried to tell her 
I didn’t have time for any nonsense, but this 
woman was hysterical. “Randy’s missing!” she 
cried. “He didn’t come home from work! His 
boss said he never even showed up!” So Molly 
and I went over there and immediately we 
could see, through the little garage windows, 
what Deb hadn’t yet noticed, that her hus- 
band’s Subaru was still in there. So I rolled up 
the big door and there he was, sleeping in his 


Outback. That’s how it ap- 
peared, anyway, as if Randy 
was just taking a good long 
nap, his face wearing the 
clamped smile of a man 
rowing peacefully through 
dreams. The happiest I’d 
seen him look in years. 

So I guess I wasn’t mad 
about it, but Deb was cer- 
tainly upset. She eventu- 
ally did the stages, though. 
Anger, bargaining, all of 
it. She got better. She even 
got remarried, to that hack 
dentist with his office be- 
side the candy store. The one 
who parks his penis-shaped 
sports car all over town. Or 
maybe I don’t know the guy 
well enough to hate him, but the point is, Deb 
moved on. It’s me who still dwells on how, when 
we found old Randy piloting his Outback into 
the hereafter, the vehicle was heaped with 
dead squirrels. Squirrels! You see, a rather siz- 
able community of these rodents had taken up 
residence in the rafters of Randy’s garage. I’d 
been over there with him a few times drinking 
beer and picking off the little fuckers with my 
Winchester, but it was no use. They were mul- 
tiplying faster than I could reload. But now I 
figure I’ve got the way to do it. The nexttime a 
neighbor needs his garage cleared of vermin, 
I’m just going to tell him to leave the car run- 
ning with the doors closed. 


710%. 


Yes, Miss Kay, it’s true that my story has veered 
from its original course, but the point is that I 
don’t want to share the particulars of my anger 
with a room full of — 


Yes, Herb, thank you for pointing that out. I 
did say “my anger,” didn't I? But isn’t it thera- 
pist Kay’s job to catch us on the hidden seman- 
tics of our damaged psyches? And besides, it 
isn’t anger. How could it be? Molly loved me 


to the point of possession, and I loved her. If 
anything, she was the one to be angry with me, 
for leaving. 

Which is actually where I was headed with 
my squirrel anecdote, because it was right 
around the time of my good friend Randy’s 
death that I first began to wake up during the 
night with thoughts of leaving Molly. This was 
years before my actual departure, mind you, 
but there was something about that tranquil 
look waxed onto Randy Menard’s dead face 
that made me want to drive my own wheels to 
some happier place. 

Before anyone gets excited, though, I’m not 
the suicidal type. No offense to your brother, 
Herb, or to you, Carol, for the long nights you 
claim to have spent considering it, but I just 
don’t see it as a legitimate solution. I’m so sad 
I’m gonna make everyone I know go to a fuck- 
ing funeral? 


Sorry, everyone. The F word. I’m work- 
ing on it. But where was I? Right, so 
Randy takes a road trip to Elysium, and 
then I start getting these weird middle- 
of-the-night feelings like I need to get 
in the truck and drive until I’m a bach- 
elor again. For hours sometimes I’d lie 
there beside my beloved wife imagin- 
ing the clothes I might fold into a duffel. 
Night after night like this, month after 
month, like one of those old-time pris- 
oners visualizing every footstep of the 
jailbreak. I had it down to a perfect sin- 
gle piece of luggage filled with the exact 
right clothes. A go-bag to end all go-bags. 

And then one night, completely out 
of nowhere, without even realizing she 
wasn’t sound asleep, Molly cleared her 
throat and said, “What are you think- 
ing about right now?” Just like that, with the 
“right now” tacked on the end to make sure I 
didn’t think she was just making idle conver- 
sation. And for a second, I was going to tell her. 
But when I opened my mouth, I said the first 
other thing that popped into my head. I said, 
“Molly dear, I wish you'd quit driving around 
with Shackleton on your lap. It's dangerous, for 
both of you." 

She just lay there in silence, for so long I 
thought maybe she'd fallen back asleep. But 
then, inthis solemn little voice, she said, ^Okay, 
Darrel, I promise I won't do that anymore." 


Oh, sorry, good question, Carol. Shackleton, 
or *Shack" as we called him, was our Jack Rus- 
sell terrier. Okay, let's pause here. I know what 
you guys are thinking. You're thinking, This 
hulking motherfucker—sorry, Miss Kay—this 


hulking bastard owned a motherfucking toy 
dog? And to be honest, "toy" probably doesn't 
even paint a fair picture. This animal was a 
runt of runts, which is actually why we ended 
up with him. You see, good old Randy the Sad 
had a Jack Russell for himself, which he and 
Deb bought from a breeder in California. Then 
they bred this dog themselves every few years, 
sold off the puppies and used the money to 
trade up for a new snowmobile. But of course 
no one lays down any coin for the runt of the 
litter, so Randy started talking about carrying 
thething up the pass and leaving it for the coy- 
otes. This is what the man honestly proposed. 
To hear him eulogized, you'd think he was kind 
toallcreatures great and small, but I'm telling 
you Randy Menard had a demon inside him, 
which happens to be my theory on suicide, by 
the way, that these people who end themselves, 


He was 
consumed by 
demons while 

hunting 

squirrels in 
his garage. 


that it's actually this occupying demon they're 
trying to kill when they — 


Okay, fair enough, Miss Kay. It's just a theory. 
But anyway, I was sitting on a lawn chair in 
Randy's garage some years before he did him- 
self in, and that pee-soaked newborn pup was 
lying in a crate full of soiled shop towels, and 
Randy took his ball-peen hammer off the peg- 
board and said, *One bop on the head and that 
puppy wakes up inside a coyote's gut." 

Evil, right? Carol, are you listening to this? 
This is why you're not actually going to kill 
yourself. You don't have a demon inside you. 
You just miss your dad. This grief of ours is a 
hell of a thing, but we're not possessed. Trust 
me, Carol, you're a survivor. 

Which is what I'm getting at with Shack. This 
dog was a fighter too. He just needed someone 


to give him a chance. So I plucked him from 
that crate and took him out of there, without 
even asking. And that night, when I got home, 
there was my beloved wife in the kitchen, wear- 
inga look like her house cat is gravely mistaken 
if he thinks he’s an outdoor cat now. She espe- 
cially wanted to know what Debra Menard had 
been phoning her about—something to do with 
me chopping Randy on the breastbone with a 
hammer and stealing the last puppy they’d 
been thinking of keeping for themselves. 
“Bullshit, for themselves,” I said to Molly, 
and told her about Randy’s plan with the coy- 
otes and would she please just look how god- 
damn malnourished this animal has gotten 
sitting over there in that steaming death trap 
of agarage. 
This was where Molly came around to my 
side. She was still pissed at how I'd gone about 
it, and there was no end to the phone 
calls from Deb about the little piece of 
bone chipped offthe bottom of Randy's 
sternum now just sort of floating in the 
center of his fat chest. But before those 
weeks of static from the Menards, and 
way before we eventually refriended 
them so successfully that it would be 
me and Molly who'd come fish Randy 
out from under that mounded carnage 
of squirrels, it was just the three of us 
in that kitchen together—husband, 
wife, dog. 

In that way, Shack was like our child, 
in lieu of actual children, which we could 
not have. This is another one of those de- 
tails Га prefer not to share with you peo- 
ple, but rather than suffer the arguments 
of those who believe the reproductive tra- 
vails of my wife and I might somehow be 
relevant to my current grief, ГП just say 

that our issues were actually my issues. I could 
raise the crane just fine—no problems there, I 
assure you—but there’s such a thing as sperm 
motility апа- 


Understood, Miss therapist. I just didn’t want 
the Freudians in the room to think I was hold- 
ing back about my damaged loins’ influence on 
the present state of my psyche. But the fact is, 
if such an issue had ever existed, this tiny dog 
seemed to be filling that void in our lives. 

Of course we'd thought about getting a pet 
before, but we didn't want to be those people 
who have dogs instead of children. And Shack 
wasn't some proxy. He was a miraculous event 
in our lives. I swear something half magical 
came over me that day in Randy’s garage. But 
it wasn't any swell of compassion, and the 
last thing I desired in my life was a purse-size 


142 


canine. So do you see how it was? Can you hear 
the whispers I so desperately wanted to avoid? 
What is he doing with that miniature dog? He 
played high school football, for God’s sake. 
And have you heard, he’s shooting blanks! No, 
it wasn’t compassion that drove me to take 
Shack that day, and I had very little humanity 
left in my life at that point. My humanity was 
being wasted feeling sorry for myself for all the 
heirs I'd never sire, secretly hating Molly Юг 
shrugging her shoulders and saying, “So ме 
adopt.” But I'd seen the videos of those feral Ro- 
manian orphans. Put them all to sleep, right? 
And leave the runt pup to the coyotes? It was 
exactly the kind of thing I could’ve said. And 
how many times had I sat in that very lawn 
chair with my Winchester pointed to the raf- 
ters ready to blow away asmall mammal? But 
the point is, that time in the garage I wasn't 
the one saying it. And with that tiny 
whimpering dog lying there in that 

crate, something deep inside me just 

broke open. I don't know what it was, 

but it wasn't compassion. It was more 
elemental than that. Like pure shame. 

And humiliation. Yes, that's it. Looking 

into Shackleton's suffering yellow eyes 

was like a great and merciful shame, 
gushing through me, humiliating me... 

and maybe forgiving me too, for all the 
horrible shit I’ve done. 

Hold on a second. I’m not crying. I'm 
just, goddamn it, that dog. He wasa pain 
in the ass those first months, and an ex- 
pense too. Imagine hooking a rat up to 
an IV and a feeding tube. Can you see 
it? The little heart monitor going beep? 

Close your eyes if you need to. Come 

on, Jose. Carol, you too. Close 'em. Can 

you guys see this pitiful sight? Okay, 
ready...? Now imagine the invoice coming in 
the mail. 

You wouldn't believe what intensive veteri- 
nary care costs. More than a coyote, for sure. 
Bill, you must know what I'm talking about. 
I'veseen you drive away in that shiny Cadillac. 
You some kind of rich veterinarian? And those 
vanity plates: DR-BILL. What is that, a play on 
words or something? No? Not gonna take the 
bait? One of these days we'll get you talking, 
Bill. I tried to hold out too, brother, but eventu- 
ally Herb's beady eyes just overwhelm you and 
you start gushing about your poor dead dog. It’s 
pathetic, me sitting here between Carol with 
her murdered father and Jose with his—what 
was it again, Jose? 


Right, dead sister. Black ice. Honestly, there’s 
no excuse for me coming in here and getting 


choked up over a dog that wasn’t supposed to 
live to begin with. But that was exactly the 
issue. Shack started improving. He came home 
and he began eating food and sleeping on our 
laps, and his presence pumped new life into our 
marriage, for atime. The married people in the 
room know how it goes, how things grow stale. 
Or, I suppose Iwas the one growing stale. I don’t 
know why, but one day I just stopped gushing 
with all that great forgiving shame. It was prob- 
ably the day I found Randy in the garage and 
started dreaming of go-bags. 

But I kept that fantasy to myself. I stood 
firm against the gathering demons. I loved my 
wife, after all. I loved her enough to lie to her 
in the stark midnight void, to tell her I didn’t 
like the way she drove around with our dog on 
her lap when what I really should’ve said was 
“Can you please find me a support group for 


This fat 
mustasche in 


а sheriff's hat 


said my wife 
had beenina 
car accident. 


assholes who can’t be happy with their incred- 
ible good fortune?” 

But it’s not like I took off the very next 
day either. I waited for the feeling to pass. I 
stayed quiet, especially when the cops came 
sniffing around. After all, they just wanted 
to tie up some loose ends and stamp Randy’s 
file a suicide. 

“You really have a stamp like that?” I asked 
them. But the detectives weren’t in a joking 
mood. Turned out Randy’s sister was someone 
at the county coroner’s office, so the medical 
examiner was dragging his feet and the police 
had to make like they had an honest death in- 
vestigation on their hands. So they questioned 
me about the ball-peen hammer incident and 
the stolen pet and also about a more distant 
episode where I allegedly strangled Randy in 
the parking lot outside Brothers’ Tavern. But 


I wasn’t worried about the police. My wife was 
well liked around town, and I was well liked by 
her. So I told those cops, “Go ask Molly about 
my whereabouts. She'll tell you I was here the 
whole time.” Which she did. And the cops 
haven’t been back since, so I assume the case 
of the sad, evil neighbor who just couldn’t goon 
is now closed. 


Doctor Bill speaks! Finally! And I was afraid 
we'd have to go on in perpetuity listening to you 
rattle off name and serial number. But no shit? 
You actually knew Randy Menard? A patient 
of yours, I bet. Well, if you were the one who 
tended to his chipped sternum, then I regret 
to inform you the patient didn’t make it after 
all. He was consumed by demons while hunting 
squirrels in his garage. The police investigated, 
but the demon fled. It may now be hiding out 
inside Carol’s heart— 


Okay, yes, Miss Kay, that was in poor 
taste. Carol, I apologize. It’s just that 
you guys have got me picking at some 
old wounds, and—hmm, okay, you've 
all been patient with me, with the 
swearing and all, and, let’s see, Herb, 
are you still awake? What was it you 
were fishing for earlier? My “anger”? 
Okay, let’s try that out. If you guys like 
it, then we can vote to see if I should in- 
clude it the next time I share my feel- 
ings with strangers in the basement of 
a community center— 


Iam getting to it, Bill. However, I must 

say your long-anticipated contribu- 

tion hasn’t been entirely pleasant. But 

where was I? Anger...anger...okay, so in 

all honesty, no bullshit, I am still angry 
with Molly. It is, after all, an incredibly stupid 
thing to do. So yes, anger is actually a fair word 
to use here. 

Imagine stealing a dying puppy from the 
jaws of a coyote, plunking down thousands in 
medical bills, then thousands more because it 
has every degenerative disease a dog can have, 
but you end up loving it like it’s the honest-to- 
God embodiment of the children you couldn’t 
give your wife, and then she gets in the car one 
day to take the latest ream of adoption forms to 
the post office and some teenager rolls through 
a stop sign and the two cars bump gently but 
just hard enough to trigger the airbag and this 
miracle dog explodes all over the woman you 
love more than anything in the world. 

This happens, people. This happens every- 
where, all the time. Ask Doctor Bill. He prob- 
ably has the stats in his head about how many 


145 


beloved terriers get crushed by airbags each 
year. He'll give youthe numbers, and he'll come 
to the defense of a shit-heel like Randy Menard, 
but he won't actually tell anybody why he's at 
our meeting. 


No, Bill. You go fuck yourself. 

Okay, I'd like to restart things by thanking 
Miss Kay for giving everyone a few minutes to 
cool off. I, for one, think a recess could be a 
healthy part of every meeting, but we'll vote 
on that later. 


Right, of course, there will be no voting on any- 
thing. And thank you also, Miss Kay, for re- 
minding me that I didn’t apologize to Bill for 
my, as you put it, “aggressive behavior.” In fact, 
instead of merely apologizing, ГП take this mo- 
ment to cordially invite Bill to share his reason 
for being here.... 


Well, if Bill isn’t going to talk, then Г11— 


Okay, wow. Tissues anyone? That was the worst 
thing I’ve ever heard, Bill. Honestly, the worst. 
A bit thin on details for the likes of Herb and 
Miss therapist, but there'll be time enough for 


that next week. But yeah, Jesus, your loss takes 
the cake. This is humbling. I think I've just 
been humbled. And I'm sterile, so that's say- 
ing something. But, oh man, your wife of how 
many years? And this happened on the very 
day of your anniversary? Yeah, okay, I'm re- 
membering the article in the Gazette now. The 
gates weren't working, was that it? I mean usu- 
ally people are just trying to beat the train, but 
sometimes there's more of a death wish—— 


I'm not trying to usurp Bill's narrative, Miss 
Kay. I’m just ruminating on the tragedy. And 
Bill's clearly not afraid to interrupt me, so if he 
wants to go on with more details, he should feel 
free. But in the meantime, I feel I've gathered 
some momentum in processing my own loss. 
I'm going through the stages here. I feel like 
just today I've moved past denial and anger 
into bargaining, or maybe even depression. De- 
pression would be nice. Then bring on accep- 
tance! Like Deb Menard. She got over Randy in 
no time. She did her stages at high volume, so 
the grief burned off faster. I remember going 
over there one day to see how she was holding 
up and she had the pool-cleaning guy, Lance 
something—he did maintenance on our Jacuzzi 
too—facedown in her lap. This was only a few 


months after Randy had shuffled off his mor- 
tal coil, so needless to say, I was bothered by the 
sight. Worse, though, it turned out to be the very 
day that we’d lose Shack in that fender bender. 

Iremember heading right back home to wait 
for Molly so I could tell her that Deb was mak- 
ing a rebound with the pool boy. But Molly 
didn’t come home, and the hours started pil- 
ing up, and she wasn’t answering her phone. 
And every time my cell rang it was Deb want- 
ing to know why I couldn’t knock first, and 
Deb wanting to know if my feelings were hurt, 
and Deb explaining that it’s absurd for her to 
remain monogamous in a relationship with a 
married man. But I didn’t have time for that 
woman’s bullshit with my wife mysteriously 
running three hours late. And right then, the 
police came waltzing up my front walk. Not the 
same ones who'd come sniffing for blood on my 
hands, but this fat mustache in a sheriff’s hat 
who said my wife had been in a car accident and 
that she was in surgery at the county hospital 
having broken ribs removed. 

But I wasn't understanding him. I was in 
shock. He was blathering on, and I wasn't hear- 
ing him right. Finally, I snapped out of my daze 
and asked this officer, “Did you say that nine of 
her ribs are broken?” 


144 


“Not nine ribs,” the cop said. “Canine ribs. 
The dog’s bones were lodged in your wife’s chest 
and neck.” 

I got to the hospital just as Molly was coming 
into post-op. She was moaning, “I killed Shack- 
leton!” and I kept saying, “You're fine, that's 
all that matters.” But every time I opened my 
mouth she’d flinch like she was sure I was going 
to say “I told you so.” 


What do you mean next week? I can’t just pick 
up mid-story seven days later. Can’t you guys 
stay alittle longer? I’m almost done. Two more 
minutes, that's all. 111 cut to the chase. Jose, 
sit down. Herb, come on. How is it possible that 
Bill is the only one not packing up? 

Okay, thank you. All right, where 
was I? Post-op? Forget post-op. 
I'll jump to post-post-op, which is 
where it really goes downhill. 

Imagine this. Imagine bringing 
your catatonic wife home from the 
hospital and dragging her up to the 
bedroom with the little crater still 
in the bedspread where your mira- 
cle dog took the last afternoon nap 
of his life, and you tuck in this wife 
of yours, groggy and blood-crusted 
andlaced up with surgeon's thread, 
and you kiss her on the forehead as 
she drifts into an ocean of pain- 
killer dreams, and then, as if your 
life isn't complicated enough, you 
come downstairs to an answering 
machine that's got a dozen mes- 
sages from Deb Menard saying 
she's so, so sorry and that the pool 
boy doesn't mean anything to her 
andthat she needs your forgiveness 
or she’s going to kill herself and that 
she forgives you for whatever hap- 
pened with Randy, for absolutely 
whatever it was you did to him if 
you did anything at all because she 
knows now that the two of you are 
meant to be together forever. 

But then the message ended abruptly and I 
looked up to find my wife, suddenly wide awake 
and in the room with me, standing there with 
her finger on the answering machine's STOP 
button, her eyes boring deep into the center of 
my chest, as if she was seeing something there 
she hadn't noticed before, like just maybe she 
was seeing a true demon. And this is my final 
theory on demons, by the way—that they don't 
hunt you down and crawl inside you or anything 
like that, but rather they start out as something 
good and pure that you invite into your heart, 
like love or friendship, before morphing into a 


ravenous imp that feeds on your guts. I still love 
Molly like I always did, but it's her love that's 
turned rotten inside me, possessing me. 

Yes, I see you people packing up again. It's 
fine. I'm done. I'm truly and forever done. I'm 
possessed. We tried to un-possess me in cou- 
ples' counseling, but it's difficultto fix atough 
problem when giving up is an option too. And 
by “giving up” of course I mean that I wrote my 
little note and ran away. 

See ya, Herb. It's cool. I know you've got 
places to be. Later, Jose. 

Anyway, after I left, I still kept tabs on Molly. 
She wasn’t exactly thriving, but she pressed on, 
until she didn’t. One day she was there in the 
amber nighttime windows of the home we once 


Better to have 
the ones we love 
wrenched from 
us in spectacu- 
lar fashion than 
to watch them 


succumb to a 


series of minor 


mistakes. 


shared, and then the next day she was on a slab 
in the basement of the hospital. Complications 
from surgery. Elective surgery. But youcan halt 
your conjecture, Bill. It wasn’t a nose job or any- 
thing. Vanity wasn’t in Molly’s heart. There’d 
been scars where Shack’s rib cage had stabbed 
into her neck, and a single woman needs to 
keep herself looking good, right? Anyway, it 
was aroutine procedure, until a sponge got left 
behind and festered. 

“The infection spread too quickly,” her sur- 
geon explained to me. “There was nothing we 
could’ve done.” I had to agree, not being a doc- 
tor. Plus, I was in shock again. “What do you 


mean she’s gone?” I said, responding to the 
part when they’d first given me the news. But 
then I got caught up. I said, “Well, you could’ve 
not left the sponge inside her neck is what you 
could’ve done.” The surgeon’s face seemed to 
agree with this, but he remained quiet. Some- 
where, a guilty nurse was being coached up ina 
broom closet. I could practically hear the whis- 
pering. Or maybe it was the voice of my inner 
demon, the day’s news having emboldened it to 
begin haunting me even before I went home to 
my motel room full of liquor bottles. 

See ya, Carol! 

Yep, just a botched surgery. How mundanely 
tragic, right? Give me a head-on with a semi 
like Jose’s sister. Or a freight train, even. Am I 

wrong, Bill? Better to have the ones 
we love wrenched from us in spectac- 
ular fashion than to watch them suc- 
cumb to a series of minor mistakes. 


And good night to you too, Miss Kay! 

Guess it’s just you and me now, 
Bill. Only the widowers, if your sto- 
ry’s to be believed. Your tale of woe 
isn’t very convincing yet, but that’s 
just because you haven't come forth 
with the details that implicate you 
in the calamity. Miss Kay would 
have us believe we’re telling our sto- 
ries here in order to feel better, but 
that isn't really it. You'll eventually 
cave in with your own ugly particu- 
lars because you'll feel the need to 
demarcate the line inside yourself 
where the simple sorrow butts up 
against the terrible, gnawing regret. 
Your story in brief is made improba- 
ble by its one-dimensional sadness, 
but maybe next week you'll throw 
some light into the dimmer corners 
of your grief. Like the time, years 
ago, when I pressed Deb Menard up 
against the fridge at a Christmas 
party while my beloved wife chatted 
up my boss in the next room. Or the dead color 
that filled Molly’s eyes as she coolly verified my 
alibi for the morning of Randy Menard’s mur- 
der. Or the way my voice trembled like acoward’s 
as I spoke into the midnight void while her wet 
corneas caught the moonlight just so. 

Here lies the true shame of a life, Bill, and 
the wicked irony too, unmerciful in its inces- 
sant return, night after night, hour after hour, 
as I lie awake in bed wishing like hell somebody 
was there to roll over and ask me, “What are you 
thinking about right now?” Just like that, with 
the “right now” tacked on the end to make sure I 
don’t think she’s just making conversation. Mi 


НІНІНІНІҢНІНІҢІНІҢІНІЕІНІНІҢІНІНІҢІҢІНІҢІНІҢГЕ! 


каки и TH ки ки ки кик 


IS THIS GUY 
FOR REAL? 


hrs hr rt tk 4.4. 4.4.4.9 .9.2. 4.2.2.2. 0.4.4.0 sk x & & 2 


IN OCTOBER 1981, PLAYBOY CHALLENGED ABSURDIST COMEDIAN AND 
PERFORMANCE ARTIST ANDY KAUFMAN TO A WRESTLING MATCH AGAINST 
SEPTEMBER 1981 PLAYMATE SUSAN SMITH. KAUFMAN ACCEPTED; HE'D BEEN 

WRESTLING WOMEN FOR YEARS. THE MAGAZINE IMMORTALIZED THE EVENT 
IN A FEBRUARY 1982 FEATURE. 


РЕНЕ /5 THIS GUY FOR REAL? 
ы THE UNBELIEVABLE ANDY 
yw KAUFMAN BY BOX BROWN 
EXPLORES KAUFMAN S 
WRESTLING CAREER 
AND FETISH. 


ВЕРЕ А ЕВ В НН Н АНН НИЕ 


3283:281281:281:81:2831:261: 83263:281:81281261:61:61: 01:01:01:01:01:01:01:11: 


KAUFMAN HAD A VISION: ONE DAY THERE WOULD BE WRESTLING CLUBS JUSTLIKE DANCE CLUBS. AFTER YOU 
WRESTLED SOMEONE, KAUFMAN TOLD WRITING PARTNER BOB ZMUDA, IT'D BEA QUICK JUMP To THE BEDROOM, 
DURING KAUFMAN‘S ACT HE CHALLENGED WOMEN IN THE AUDIENCE, OFFERING $1,000 TO ANY WHO COULD PIN HIM. 


KAUFMAN BOASTED ABOUT BEING THE UNDEFEATED “INTERGENDER WRESTLING CHAMPION” -A TITLE HE MADE UP — 
AND CLAIMED HE'D SLEPT WITH 70% OF HISOPPONENTS. SMITH WASA DIRT BIKER AND KARATE ENTHUSIAST 
WHO GREW UP MILKING COWS ONAFARM IN WISCONSIN. SHE TRAINED WITH A WRESTLING COACH TO 
PREPARE FOR THE MATCH. 


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THE MATCH TOOK PLACE OCTOBER 11, 1981, AT PLAYBOY'S ATLANTIC CITY HOTEL-CASINO. AT 
THEIR WEIGH-IN, KAUFMAN AND SMITH POSED FOR PHOTOS, ANSWERED PRESS QUESTIONS— AND EXCHANGED 
PLENTY OF TRASH TALK, WITH KAUFMAN EVENTUALLY GETTING HIMSELF THROWN OUT OF THE ROOM.BY THE 
TIME KAUFMAN ENTERED THE RING TOFACE SMITH THAT EVENING, HE HAD ALREADY “DEFEATED” 


= + 


IN PRELIMINARY ROUNDS SIX WOMEN~ALL VOLUNTEERS FROM THE STANDS- THANKS IN NO SMALL PART 
TO REF ZMUDA'S QUESTIONABLE CALLS. BUT FOR THE MAIN EVENT, PLATINUM-HAIRED “PRETTY BOY” LARRY 
SHARPE, A WELL-KNOWN PROFESSIONAL WRESTLER, OFFICIATED. AFTER THE BELL RANG, SMITH QUICKLY 
SHOWED HER ATHLETICISM, HANDILY LEG -DROPPING KAUFMAN, THEN WRIGGLING OUT OF А HEADLOCK AND 
FLIPPING HIM ON HIS BACK. 


SHARPE LATER SAID KAUFMAN 
HAD TAUNTED SMITH THROUGH- 
OUT THE MATCH, WHISPERING IN 
HER EAR, "І KNOW YOU WANNA 
FUCK ME.” KAUFMAN SEEMED 
TO BE PLAYING A STEROIDAL 
VERSION OF BOBBY RIGGS— 
мно LOST TO BILLIE JEAN 
KING IN THE INFAMOUS 1473 
“BATTLE OF THE SEXES.” 


THEEND OF THE MATCH WAS PURE PRO-WRESTLING PERFORMANCE. SMITH WAS MORE THAN 
HOLDING HER OWN. TWICE SHE HAD KAUFMAN PINNED, BUT SHARPE WAS DISTRACTED BY THE 
SUDDEN APPEARANCE OF ZMUDA, WHO WAS TRYING TOENTER THE RING, AND DIDN'T SEE. KAUFMAN 
FLIPPED SMITH, AND SHARPE, PAYING ATTENTION AT LAST, GAVE WHAT PLAYBOY WOULD CALL. "THE 
FASTEST THREE COUNT IN ATHLETIC HISTORY”—EVEN THOUGH HER SHOULDER WAS CLEARLY UP. 


HARD TO SAY WHY SHARPE DID A FAST COUNT; HE MAY HAVE BEEN IN ON THE ACT, OR MAYBE 
KAUFMAN PAID НІМ OFF, AFTER 18 MINUTES AND 35 SECONDS THE MATCH WAS OVER: 
KAUFMAN REMAINED IN TERGENDER CHAMP. HE'D HOLD THE TITLE FOR THREE MORE YEARS 
UNTIL HIS UNTIMELY DEATHIN 1984. 


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Playing the part 

of cowgirl comes 
naturally to Lorena 
Medina. The Mexico 
City native feels 
right at home in the 
rough ranch land 
and dusty diners off 
Western Route 66 


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CLASSIC PLAYMATES LIV LINDELAND AND KIM FARBER * VINTAGE CARTOONS * BUNNIES ON PARADE 


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BEHIND THE 
RABBIT HEAD 


Irreverent and revolutionar | t Paul 
brought to life Hef's visionef&assophisticated 


urban lifestyle in the pagessof- PLAYBOY 


- 5 


sy DAN HYMAN 


Nearly 40 years ago PLAYBOY's then editorial 
director Arthur Kretchmer shared a cab from 
the airport with a stranger. An international 
consultant, the woman proved an intriguing 
chat. When Kretchmer mentioned he worked for 
PLAYBOY, the company whose logo, he boasted, 
was the second most famous on Earth—behind 
only Coca-Cola—she smiled and proceeded to 
disagree. She’d spent much time in Asiaand had 
just returned from Africa; without a doubt, she 
told Kretchmer, “yours is the most recognized 
logo in the world.” Kretchmer chuckles as he re- 
tells this story. The woman may have thought she 
was toasting him or PLAYBOY or perhaps Hugh 
Hefner. But she was in fact saluting Art Paul. 

Paul was Hefner's very first hire—founding art 
director of the nascent PLAYBOY—and he quickly 
proved his worth, drafting the now ubiquitous 
Rabbit Head in less than an hour. Certainly his 
best-known creation, the symbol is just one of 
his countless contributions to PLAYBOY. 

As Hef put it in his cartoon diary, Paul’s fun- 
damental mission was to “really give the mag- 
azine a class look.” Charged with crafting the 
publication's overall visual aesthetic, Paul had 
loftier ambitions. 

“Tset out to change illustration itself by push- 
ing artists and illustrators to be more personal, 
expressive and innovative,” Paul tells me viaa 
long e-mail correspondence before we meet 
in person. And he doubled down on the maga- 
zine’s progressive attitude and voice, he says, 
through its design. “I was guided by PLAYBOY's 
spirit of change and the idea that there should 
be no ‘high’ art or ‘low’ art, that good design 
could be applied to anything.” 

He aimed to make each issue of the maga- 

zine a flight of graphic fancy. To read PLAYBOY, 
Kretchmer says, was to be taken on “an ad- 
venture, a visual experience as much as a 
reading experience.” Indeed, within the de- 
sign community PLAYBOY quickly became the 
go-to destination for the world's hottest art- 
ists and illustrators to showcase their talent. 
Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, James Rosen- 
quist and Ed Paschke are a small selection of 
the well-known artists whose work appeared in 
PLAYBOY thanks to Paul. 
In the magazine's inaugural issue Hefner 
wrote about the PLAYBOY man, who enjoys 
life's finer things: “mixing up cocktails and 
an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood 
music on the phonograph, and inviting in a 
female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on 
Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” It was Paul who 
translated this ideal into visual form. 

“The idea that PLAYBOY was a sophisticated 
product, that's all Art Paul,” says Robert New- 
man, former design director of New York and 


Y 


т 


HERITAGE 


Details, among other publications. “He’s the 
one who gave PLAYBOY its up-market, sophis- 
ticated and sensual feel.” The proof was in the 
pages, which regularly featured fine art that 
could have come straight out of a gallery. And 
Paul didn’t limit himself to the traditional op- 
tions of paintings and illustrations to accom- 
pany articles; he also solicited work across 
wildly varying mediums, from mixed-media 
creations to plaster and resin sculptures to 
stone and acrylic assemblages. 

Paul’s approach to design—liberating art- 
ists from the constraints of strict editorial 
direction—was radical at the time. 

“Tn the 1950s, illustrations tended to be dic- 
tated by editors, with art directors following or- 
ders,” Paul says. “Someone would pick a scene 
from astory and present it literally, with a cap- 
tion in case it was not literal enough—a real 
straitjacket of a formula." By contrast, he says, 
"Iasked that the illustrator interpret the sense 
or feel of the story—what gave it its power.” 

Paul expected illustrators to deliver bold, 
metaphorical and even discomfiting works— 
whatever best complemented an article. “He let 
them rip,” one art director says with a laugh. 


160 


Previous page: Art Paul sketches in light his famous 
Rabbit Head in Chicago, 1972. Above: In 1969, the 
10th-floor entrance to the art department at Playboy's 
Chicago headquarters showcased pieces across a 
variety of media—oil, wood, collage, papier-máché, 
plaster and more—that Paul had commissioned to 
illustrate articles. Left: Paul circa 1985. The Art of 
Playboy, a documentary about Art Paul by filmmaker 
Jennifer Kwong, is currently in development. 


Take, for example, Jerry Podwil’s painting that 
accompanies the December 1974 article Get- 
ting Off: adiapered baby slumps near a broken 
rattle, hand burrowed into its nappy in an ap- 
parent act of masturbation. That kind of free- 
dom was attractive to artists. 

“T never called anybody to do work for us 
who said, ‘Nah, I’m not interested,” says Tom 
Staebler, who started in PLAYBOY's art depart- 
ment in 1968 and eventually became Paul's 
protégé, then successor. “I don't care who 
it was or how big a name they were—they all 
wanted to work for PLAYBOY.” 

But suggest that his work was highly influen- 
tial and the modest Paul will shrug it off. Then 
again, he doesn't need to sing his own praises; 
others do it for him. “He was a brilliant vision- 
ary and truly a master of magazine architec- 
ture,” says Newman. 

“PLAYBOY used illustration in a completely 
different way,” says Bart Crosby, a Chicago- 
based designer and former colleague of Paul's. 
“They used it metaphorically, representation- 
ally. They used these dramatic illustrations 
that were disturbing sometimes. And Art per- 
petuated that. He encouraged it. That changed 


Top: Hugh Hefner and Art Paul examine negatives in 1955. Above left: The early art staff of PLAYBOY magazine surrounds Paul. Above right: In addition to setting the 
magazine's visual style via design and illustration, Paul was also involved with Playmate photo shoots; here he attends to details for the photo session of December 1954 
Playmate Terry Ryan—the first Playmate pictorial overseen by magazine staff. 


the world of illustration. Even the more con- 
servative publications started to be a bit more 
bold in what they were doing.” 

On a warm fall Chicago morning, Paul wel- 
comes me to the high-rise apartment he has 
shared for more than four decades with artist 
Suzanne Seed, his wife of 40 years. Sporting a 
scraggly white beard and wearing a checked 
button-down with black pants, he smiles as he 
rises from his wheelchair, grabs his wooden 
cane and pats me on the back. He turns 93 
this January and has suffered several strokes 
in the past decade; macular degeneration has 
left him nearly blind. Still, he moves through 


his apartment with a joyful curiosity. The 
space, with its panoramic view of the city and 
the occasional peregrine falcon soaring by, is 
breathtaking—not least because it is a tribute 
toacreative and collaborative life. Nearly every 
inch of the apartment is covered with art, pho- 
tographs and trinkets, many created by Paul, 
Seed and their friends and peers. 

Seed serves as my tour guide for the after- 
noon, Paul trailing behind, nodding in ap- 
proval when she showcases one of his favorite 
or most revered works: a whimsical collection 
of his drawings that seem almost to interact 
with one another (he calls it “Conversations” ); 
a colorful collage of concentric circles that 


161 


cries out with youthful whimsy; sketches of 
faces and heads that line the entryway and 
lead to an adjoining studio space. Despite his 
vision problems, Paul sketches frequently. He 
also plays the keyboard, conjuring ideas that he 
then commissions one of his composer friends 
to transform into fleshed-out recordings. 
Today he plays one of his most recent pieces 
for me, loudly, over the apartment’s speaker 
system. The song, a serpentine waltz, floats 
through the room. Paul closes his eyes and al- 
lows it to wash over him. 

Art Paul was born in Chicago on January 18, 
1925 to Jewish parents who had emigrated from 


Ukraine with two older children. When Paul 
was just one year old, his father died. “We were 
struggling for many years, including during the 
Depression, but my mother was determined to 
keep the family together,” he says. He credits 
his brother, Norman, who wanted to be asculp- 
tor but instead worked to support the family, 
with stoking his interest in the life of an artist. 
His development was also aided by his mother, 
who supported her son’s artistic ambitions; he 
recalls that she let him paint in the middle of 
the house “because the light was best there.” 
Paul accompanied his big brother on weekend 
trips to the Art Institute, sparking a lifelong 
fascination with creativity in its endless forms. 
He came to admire the work of Michelangelo, 
but he also thought highly of the illustrations he 
saw in the popular Modern Library books and 
in the magazines of the 1930s, such as Norman 
Rockwell’s work in The Saturday Evening Post. 
High art, low art—it was all simply art to him. 

Paul began looking at the world through an 
artistic lens. Specifically he became fascinated 
with faces. He preferred to draw them from his 
imagination, he says, “but when I'd look at each 
face as people streamed by on the street where I 
was selling newspapers, or at those faces com- 
ing offthe train when I went to meet my brother 
coming home from work, I’d see faces as amaz- 
ing to me as those I'd dreamed up.” 

He won a scholarship to the School of the Art 
Institute of Chicago, but his studies were inter- 
rupted by his servicein World War II. Upon his 
return to Chicago in 1945, heenrolled atthe In- 
stitute of Design, often referred to as the New 
Bauhaus for its adherence to the precepts ofthe 
seminal German art school. “Design seemed 
more connected to the world than painting," 
Paulsays. After graduating, he opened his own 
illustration and graphic design studio down- 
town, where he created ads and other work for 
top-tier clients including department store 
Marshall Field's and publisher Scott Fores- 
man. By the time a mutual friend connected 
him with Hef, Paul was enjoying a comfortable 
life thanks to his design business. 

The two met in the spring of 1953, after Hef 
had quit his job as a copywriter at Esquire. 
Hef arrived for their initial meeting at Paul's 
downtown studio "looking disheveled, har- 
ried, tired, a bit of a wild man seemingly, with 
a huge roll of tattered papers under his arm,” 
Paul says. Hef told Paul all about his idea for a 


Y 


hd 


HERITAGE 


In 


tocommissionthe experimental, personal kind 
of work from artists and illustrators that I had 
struggled to promote to clients for myself." 

The early days of PLAYBOY were harried 
ones. It was in large part only Hef and Paul 
putting together the magazine, working so 
closely that the two would argue about whose 
turn it was to take out the trash. “The 
first few issues were like a sketch- 
book in which Hef and I were feeling 
our way," Paul says. ^We were clear, 
though, and of like mind in wanting 
to do something new and experimen- 
tal.” Their relationship was one of 
symbiotic growth: Hef showing Paul 
how an editor built an issue with grip- 
pingcontent; Paul demonstrating how 
solid design could complement that 
content. 

"There was a great deal of mutual 
respect and cooperation,” Paul says. “It 
was the best of working relationships." 

The first issue they assembled, the 
landmark December 1953 PLAYBOY, 


remains of special importance to Paul. After 
visiting newsstands to research what made a 
magazine stand out, he realized that a white 
background would be eye-catching— other de- 
signers avoided stark white or black covers be- 
cause distributors frowned on them. 

“Hef had bought a black-and-white news 
photo of Marilyn Monroe sitting on a car, wav- 
ing, in a ticker-tape parade,” he recalls. “I 
blocked out everything but her and added a few 
blocks to the side to suggest confetti—in which 
I put a very few small cover blurbs.” He placed 
it all atop a sea of white, with red text accents. 
“It looked fresh in the riot of color and mess of 
cover blurbs on all the other magazines—as did 
Marilyn’s smile.” 

Many of Paul’s early PLAYBOY covers are 
risk-taking and unorthodox, and sometimes 
strikingly minimalist. The June 1957 cover, 
for example, is entirely white but for two black 
Rabbit Head cufflinks; inside, the fiction story 
echoes this design with a nearly all-white two- 
page spread save for a lone fly in the upper left 
corner. Paul hired atechnical artist to draw the 
insect hyperrealistically. “It’s a favorite of de- 
signers,” he says of the layout. “They love that I 
dared to make it almost entirely white space, as 
та Пу had just landed on the actual page of the 
magazine.” Inventive design flowed through 
PLAYBOY, with Paul frequently incorporat- 
ing die-cut or folded pages into his layouts— 
something he calls “participatory graphics.” 

PLAYBOY's art department was a thrilling 
place to work. With set designers and model 


new men’s magazine—Stag Party was its title. 
Hef did his best to persuade Paul to join him. 
"I was hesitant, as I had great clients I hated 
to give up,” Paul says, but he ultimately decided 
to take the job as art director of what was soon 
renamed PLAYBOY. Paul says he was swayed by 
Hef’s promise “to give me the complete freedom 


Top: Art Paul in Playboy’s Chicago office. “Form follows 
frustration” is his version of the design principle “form 
follows function"—meaning not every design comes to him 
as quickly as the Rabbit Head did. Middle left: Paul's family, 
including his mother (pictured with Paul), supported his 
early artistic ambitions. Middle right: Paul climbs aboard a 
practice flight in the Army Air Corps, circa 1943. Right: For 
Paul's 25th anniversary as art director, the Playboy team 
thanked him with an appropriately customized card. 


162 


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HERITAGE 


makers on staff, the art directors had no cre- 
ative boundaries. “If you could think it up, you 
could make it happen,” Staebler says. The cre- 
ative community took notice: In its first 15 
years, PLAYBOY received more than 150 hon- 
ors and was recognized by the likes of the Art 
Directors Club of New York and the Society of 
Illustrators. Paul won several hundred awards 
for his work and toured the world with his Be- 
yond Illustration exhibit, showcasing some of 
the magazine's most celebrated art pieces in 
museums and galleries from Europe to Asia. 
He even helped shape the magazine's editorial 
content: He's credited with conceptualizing 
the annual Year in Sex feature, which first ran 
in February 1977 —though, ав Kretchmer says 
with a laugh, in the meeting where Paul intro- 
duced the idea, Hefjokingly said, “Thisisagreat 
job you've done. I'm really glad I suggested it." 

Few other art directors become as synon- 
ymous with the magazine they work for as 
Paul did, says Rolling Stone art director Mark 
Maltais. But after nearly three decades at the 
helm of PLAYBOY's art department, Paul sensed 
his life there had run its course. He left the 
magazine in late 1982. 

Paul spent the ensuing decades working out 
of his home studio (contributing illustrations 
to PLAYBOY from time to time), hosting exhibits 
and showing everywhere from Japan to his na- 
tive Chicago. In 1986 he was inducted into the 
Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, and he received 
lifetime achievement awards from the Society of 
Publication Designers, AIGA and Illinois Insti- 
tute of Technology’s Institute of Design. 

He has stayed busy into his 90s, continuing 
to live a life in the arts. In 2016, in partnership 
with the Chicago Design Museum, Paul created 
a custom handwritten design for Threadless, 
the online community of artists: “Tomorrow 
is a wonderful invention—it is the best defini- 
tion of hope,” it reads. In 2015 the makers of 
the popular game Cards Against Humanity 
commissioned him to create a piece for their 
limited-edition Design Pack that features illus- 
trated interpretations of George Carlin’s infa- 
mous 1972 monologue “Seven Words You Can 
Never Say on Television.” 

Paul chose to illustrate Fuck. 

Back at his apartment, sitting on his couch, 
Paul flips through a collection of his work. 
He’s quiet but deliberate, his eyes following the 
pages as they drift past. He stops and points to 
the February 1967 cover, a beautiful brunette 
lying under an unkempt white bedsheet, her 
body forming the outline of a Rabbit Head as 
she gazes up with acoy smile. Paul runs his fin- 
gers over his long-ago design. In a whisper he 
says, “That was a good one.” и 


Page-Turners 


Art Paul had an ink-stained hand in all aspects of PLAYBOY’s 
visual aesthetic, from commissioning pieces to creating them 
himself. Below are a few notable specimens 


PLAYBOY 


“| had this idea of a girl posing in the shape of the 
Rabbit,” Paul said in Playboy’s Greatest Covers. “1 
asked Donna [Michelle] and there was no problem.” 


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the chronicle of a man and his genius 
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“Chaplin was one of my favorite actors, for his playful 
creativity, so to use type in a playful way seemed to 
suit the story,” Paul says about the illustration he cre- 
ated for a March 1960 profile of the comedic actor. 


The colorful piece Paul commissioned for a 1971 story 
by John McPhee remains a favorite. “Afterward McPhee 
pointed out that inthe story the champion favored the op- 
posite hand to what was illustrated,” Paul says, “but said 
he didn’t mind the mistake as the image was so strong.” 


163 


PLAYBOY 


ENTERTAINMENT FOR шн 


59 


The cover of the strikingly minimalist June 1957 issue 
was art-directed by Paul, who says of the concept: “All 
white with just a pair of Playboy cuff links placed as if 
tossed on a linen-covered dresser top." 


Paul's ink illustration accompanies Larry Heinemann's 
July 1989 article on PTSD among Soviet soldiers 
returning from Afghanistan. The bird is a peace dove. 
"To make it sad seemed fitting," says Paul. 


Paul (above) created the art for the September 1959 short 
story The Taste of Fear by Hugh G. Foster—pseudonym of 
blacklisted writer Gordon Kahn, who'd been denounced 
by the House Un-American Activities Committee. 


Y 


HERITAGE 


Liv Lindeland 


January 1971 Playmate 


Aspiring actress Liv Lindeland was looking for adventure 
then sheflew to the United States from her native Norway 
in 1965. "It was my restlessness that made me decide to 
come to America," she said. *I came just for a visit, but 
then I arrived, I liked the country and the people so much 
I decided to stay.” Settling in Los Angeles, Liv found acting 
roles in both television and film and eventually became a 
talent agent, but it was in the pages of PLAYBOY that she 
made history. With her sun-soaked 1971 Centerfold, Liv 
became the first Playmate to show a tuft of clearly exposed 
pubic hair (though nether fuzz had made its inaugural 
magazine appearance ona non-Playmate in 1969). Readers 
everywhere appreciated her moxie, and Liv won the title 
of Playmate of the Year for 1972. The sweet set of wheels 
below—a Lincoln-Mercury de Tomaso Pantera—was part 
of Liv’s PMOY prize package. 


Чаш | = 


HERITAGE 


Kim 
Farber = 


February 1967 Playmate Ла TS. — 
The Theater Bunny was a short-lived breed, but 

thanks to women like Kim Farber, she made 

her mark. Kim was working as a ticket-taker 

at Chicago's Playboy Theater—one of a s ай | 
chain owned by Playboy Enterprises andknown 

for screening indie flicks, censored films and ғ 
fare from Playboy Productions—when she " 
was discovered. Asked to be a Playmate, the 
then 20-year-old with the wonderfully mod 
haircut did not hesitate. "I'd always wanted to 
be a Playmate,” she said. Among Kim’s eclec- 
tic interests were motorcycling, ice-skating, 
authors Tom Wolfe and James Michener, and 
bold fashion (“If I had my way, I'd drape the 
whole Л ight orange,” she noted), but 
gaining life experience was her top priority 
before deciding on a career path. “I may be 
trying to do everything, but I’m trying to do 
everything in the right order.” 


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Classic Cartoons 


Celebrate another trip around the sun with these seasonal knee slappers 


Last year's resolution didn't last too long. 
It was ruining my sex life. ü 


172 


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Introducing the new Playboy bedding collaboration 


available at NightShiftGoods.com and select retailers 


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HERITAGE 


"Most bears bibernate during tbe winter." "On your lunch break, would you pick up a Valentine 
card that doesn't commit me to anything, lovewise?” 


«Tr» 


m sorry, sir, but Professor Dornley does not wish to “The Super Bowl deserves nothing less." 
be disturbed for the rest of the winter.” 


174 


Read it for the articles. 
Stay for the Playmates. 


SIGN UP FOR PLAYBOY’S NEWSLETTER AT 


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TO THE BATMOBILE! 


IT'S THE BATMAN CLASSIC TV SERIES ILLUMINATED BATMOBILE™ 


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Flawlessly hand-crafted, hand-painted, classic 
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Mrs. Mr. Ms. 
SSS... м ааа к кақ Name (Please Print Clearly) 
BRADFORD HANGE 
“COLLECTIBLES 
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©2017 BGE 01-26417-001-SIL Please reserve the BATMAN Classic TV Series 
BATMAN and all related characters and BATMOBILE™ as described in this announcement. State Zi 
B mes р — 
elements © & ™ DC Comics and Warner Limit: one per order. 
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THE DYNAMIC DUO ін THE 
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Authentic in every detail, this 1966 model BATMOBILE" is impeccably hand-crafted, 
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| ©2016 The Bradford Exchange 
а“ на Че АИИ oo LET ELE | 01-26417-001-SIL 


% From egg to warrior, 
the four stages of 
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TM & © 2017 TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM 
CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 


THE 
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Mrs. Mr. Ms. 


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*Plus a total of $17.99 shipping 01-26110-001-E30202 
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| Limited-edition presentation restricted to 95 firing days. Please 
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OO MULT е EEE И НА ЦИ ЦИ ©2017 The Bradford Exchange 01-26110-001-SILR 


MEN’S SWEATER 


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